Synopsis
Book by Weems Renita J
Extrait
Chapter One
The Mystery of Silence and Prayer
Stumbling in the Silence
If you can't pray -- at least say your prayers.
GEORGES BERNANOS
No one is ever prepared to endure the long silence that follows intimacy. No one is prepared to face it when it comes after lovemaking. No one is prepared to face it when it follows a season of intimacy with God. It is the hardest thing to talk about, and it is the hardest thing in the spiritual journey to prepare for. The long silence between intimacies, the interminable pause between words, the immeasurable seconds between pulses, the quiet between epiphanies, the hush after ecstasy, the listening for God -- this is the spiritual journey, learning how to live in the meantime, between the last time you heard from God and the next time you hear from God.
Just as there are seasons of the year, there are seasons of the soul, changes in the atmospheric pressure that sweep over the human spirit. We move in and out of them, often without being aware of them, almost unconsciously, and frequently without appreciation for the new experiences they bring our way. Where does one begin talking about the dips and curves along the spiritual journey? How does a minister admit that she's been left slumping toward mystery more than she has been grasping mystery? What lessons have pulled me through? What happened to all those prayers I prayed and the ones I gave up praying along the way? It seems always that the task before me was learning how to distinguish when it was God who seemed hidden and when it was I who was hiding, and above all, learning how to wait out the time until we found our way back to each other.
Ministers rarely talk about the long dry periods in their spiritual journey. I know they don't because I am one, and I have rarely been willing to bring up the matter in public for fear that listeners would view me as a spiritual fraud. How does one who is supposedly an expert on prayer and spiritual disciplines admit that there are times when her own heart is unable to get through to the God she recommends to others? How does a minister admit that she hasn't heard from God in a long, long time? It is much easier and safer to talk about the springtime of faith, when the desire for inward journeying is insatiable and belief in mystery is irrepressible.
To admit that in the spiritual journey, highs are brief, sporadic, and rare and that the human heart experiences far longer periods of dullness, emptiness, and silence can be threatening. If people accept that inspiration and ecstasy are fleeting, hard-to-come-by experiences, then what is there to look forward to, if all we can expect is to stumble in the dark? To admit that it's all a stumble seems like an admission of failure -- and Protestant ministers have a particularly difficult time admitting their defeats. Blame it on our dissident origins and our works-righteousness inheritance, which resulted in years of being told that if our prayers were met with silence, then the fault lay with no one but ourselves. Or blame it on the hardy dosage of homilies we've endured (and have ourselves given) that have insisted upon viewing God as readily available, waiting only to be sought after, invited in, and embraced. When this is your spiritual legacy, it's difficult to admit aloud to feeling adrift. It's even more difficult to admit to the times when praying feels like a hollow ritual and the closest you can bring yourself to praying is to read about prayer.
The truth is that this journey is best characterized as periods of ecstasy and periods of melancholy; seasons when I can feel the presence of the sacred in my life and seasons when the perception and even the memory of the sacred have all but evaporated from the soul; moments of deep, abiding faith and moments of quiet despair; times of calm and times of clutter; moments when prayer is music and moments when I cannot abide the sound of prayer. Stumbling, staggering, slouching, and crawling forward is not the whole story, to be sure. But stumbling, staggering, slouching, and crawling feel as though they've been the largest part of my journey. It's not possible to tell everything that has happened along the way. I've probably forgotten more than I remember. Nevertheless, fleeting glimpses of the holy that have surfaced from time to time -- however faintly, briefly, and above all mysteriously -- will always be regarded as miracles of grace to me.
An ancient Jewish legend first came across my desk years ago while I was studying for my comprehensive exams as a graduate student, reminding me of the healing power of stories. The next time I encountered the legend was years later while reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes's tiny little book The Gift of Story. No longer a graduate student, I was by this time a professor reeling under the pressure of trying to balance a career as a scholar and the demands of family and love. Both times the legend found me when I was beginning to feel as though bits and pieces of crucial knowledge were slipping away from me as I sat up at night grasping for information that my superiors approved of. Sometimes information gets in the way of knowledge, I eventually concluded. Even now this ancient Jewish legend reminds me how important stories are in helping one find one's way through darkness. On those many occasions when I have not been able either to feel or sense God's divine presence and have grown exasperated by the effort of it all, it is enough simply to cling to the memory of a memory with God. Sometimes just the memory of once having sensed God's nearness, no matter how faintly, no matter how long ago, has been enough to keep me on this journey, convincing me not to turn back, leaving me cherishing the knowledge known intuitively by my soul, even though I no longer remember how my soul first came to know it.
The story is one of the legends of the Baal Shem Tov ("master of God's name") told by his followers, the Hasidim, a Jewish sect of Eastern Europe, which he founded around the middle of the eighteenth century and which lives on to this day. Hasidic teaching centers on rebirth, believing that renewal is possible.
Perceiving that he was dying, the Baal Shem Tov called for his disciples and said, "I have acted as intermediary for you, and now when I am gone you must do this for yourselves. You know the place in the forest where I call to God? Stand there in the place and do the same. Light a fire as you have been instructed to do, and say the prayer as you learned. Do all these and God will come."
Shortly afterward, the Baal Shem Tov died. The first generation of followers did exactly as he had said, and sure enough, God came as always. After this generation passed, the second generation had forgotten how to light the fire the way the Baal Shem Tov had instructed. Nevertheless, they faithfully made the pilgrimage to the special place in the forest and said the prayer they had been instructed to pray. And sure enough, God showed up.
A third generation came along, who had forgotten how to light the fire and no longer remembered the place in the forest where they should stand. But they said the prayer as the Baal Shem Tov had instructed. And again God showed up.
By the fourth generation, no one was around who remembered how to light the fire or where the special place was in the forest. Neither was anyone alive who could recall the prayer the Baal Shem Tov had instructed his followers to pray. But there was one person who remembered the story about the fire, the forest, and the prayer and delighted in telling it over and over. And sure enough, God came.
Often when I lose my way I rely on stories to get me through the deafening silence. I stand in the pulpit before a waiting congregation, open the folder where I've tucked my sermon, and nothing comes to my mind. No grand truths. No proclamations. No eloquent speeches. I'm fresh out of oracles. Nothing but stories. I set out to preach on the doctrine of grace, and nothing comes to mind but stories of grace.
A certain woman with ten coins, precious to no one but herself, loses one, and after a few moments of panic and fright, she lights a lamp, sweeps the entire house, and searches diligently for the coin she had lost. Upon finding it, she calls together all her friends, who are baffled by all the ruckus she has created over a simple coin. But she knows the true value of one coin when you're down to your last ten. She knows how easy it is to lose and how rare it is to find precious items. She knows that there's more to celebrate than meets the eye. In order to find her coin, she had to sort and sweep through the clutter in her home. And that itself was as much a cause for celebration as finding the precious coin. To find what you're looking for right smack in the midst of life's clutter is a miracle of grace. It is the story of losing something you couldn't bear to lose and finding more than what you lost.
I have lost my faith a thousand times, only to find it nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine times. Belief in mystery has waned and reappeared repeatedly throughout the journey. I wonder whether God is as weary of me as I am sometimes of my own soul. This on-again, off-again love affair with the sacred is unnerving. But it is, oddly enough, also fascinating. As frightening as it is to lose one's way on a journey one started out on confident of the route ahead, there is also something challenging about starting over, however ludicrous that may sound, of having the chance to experience the divine once more as though it were the first time.
Around and Around
Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into --
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.
DINAH MARIAH MULOCK CRAIK
Outside my front window are three crape myrtle trees I planted a few years back when we moved into our home. I love the way they explode into a deep pink bloom just when everything else in my garden is beginning to wilt and brown from the summer heat. Every year that they bloom I find reasons to move the furniture around in the house so I can get a better view out the front window. I use their bloom as my reminder that the summer is almost over and that a new school year is right around the bend and I'd better pack as much fun as possible in these last remaining weeks of summer. But the problem is that my crape myrtle trees never bloom the same time every year. The first year they bloomed in the second week of August. The second year they bloomed in the last week of July. This year I thought I noticed the first bud during the middle of July, when it was so hot everything outside looked as though it was melting from the heat. So soon? I asked myself as I walked back and forth in front of the window, trying to get a better view. I get to enjoy their luscious color for only four to six weeks before they shed their leaves, and then I have to wait another year before their color returns. In the meantime, I change my whole life around to accommodate them. And it's worth it. I can't say exactly when they will return to me next year, but I know I'll be here waiting with my chair in the window for the first sign that the mood around these parts is changing.
Seasons are not stages I learn from the view outside my window. They are neither linear nor chartable. They do not begin and end at predictable times, and no two seasons are alike. Seasons are cyclical. We move in and out of them a thousand times as our spirits grow and stretch. We know that a new one is upon us by noticing the changes in the texture of what is going on inside us. The inner atmosphere has changed. Perhaps a hush comes over the soul. Praying hurts. It's harder to focus. After a period of devouring everything written about the awakening of the spirit, we let weeks go by without visiting the altar deep inside us. After a period of seizing every opportunity possible to steal away to quiet and meditation, we experience months in which noise is the chant of saints.
As painful as they may be to endure, seasons are a welcome change. Deep within us is an internal clock regulating when it is time to gaze and when it is time to glimpse, when it is time to speak and when it is time to listen. We will gaze again, but for now we must content ourselves with a glimpse. We will speak again, but in the meanwhile we must be satisfied with listening.
Moving in and out of the seasons of the soul means above all to grow in fits and jerks, lurches and stops, leaps and crawls, and for the most part. This becomes clear when the spiritual journey is placed within the context of ordinary life, where the seasons of the soul intersect with the chaos of a full life (in my case, marriage, motherhood, ministry, scholarship, writing, living). We hope we are better human beings for becoming mindful and attentive to the spiritual side. If we are not, we will settle for being better listeners for the most part. We're never as far along as we think, because the spiritual journey is circular. We are always repeating ourselves, returning to old themes, reexamining the same issue from a different angle and from the vantage point of a different season. We don't move on; we return wiser.
Even ministers on the journey lose their way. Even specialists in prayer at some point lose interest in prayer. We struggle. We have doubts. We grow afraid. We become bored. We are tempted to walk away. Sometimes we do. But some of us return, and walk away, and return again and again. Why? Because the point of a journey is the going, the movement, the traveling, not just the arriving.
Surrender to the Silence
Waiting sometimes is the only thing left to do. You learn to wait, or you forfeit the lesson you were supposed to learn.
ANONYMOUS
Call it prayer block, a spiritual lull, the wilderness experience, the dark night of the soul. But eventually and invariably we all find ourselves suddenly wrenched into an inner abyss. For a while I blamed my prayer block on the energy spent trying to find bliss in a marriage that, given our feverish schedules, seemed always in need of reinventing. I blamed it on feeling constantly fatigued by all that went into rearing a headstrong but delightfully bewitching toddler whose needs frequently outstripped my own. I blamed it on the absurd juggling act of teaching, writing, speaking, and traveling that frequently left me a mere sentence away from babbling in public. (How many times have I awakened in the middle of the night in my bed at home or in a strange hotel room and asked myself, What city am I in? and, Is the speech over?) Eventually I had to admit that for as far back as I could remember -- which in my case was from the days when I was a teenager eking out a faith in a small storefront Pentecostal church in Atlanta -- I have anguished over what has appeared to me as the on-again, off-again character of my spiritual journey. The occasional periods of inspiration and awe seem always to be followed by longer periods of spiritual ennui. In a tradition that took religious ecstasy as proof of spiritual legitimacy, I often felt like a fraud back then for pretending to feel something I rarely felt. I thought something was wrong with me. I recall now the long prayers, the quiet tears, the secret longings, the fasts for days on end in hopes that God would fill me with awe and ecstasy. For years I felt like a failure. For several decades more, after carving out work for myself as a minister and biblical scholar, I continued to be dogged by guilt and shame.
One day I decided to surrender. After months, perhaps years, of pret...
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