Surviving Doubt
John of the Cross describes the doubt that disrupts a soul in the dark night, when all sense of knowing God is absent. Mirabai Starr translates from John’s classic work Dark Night of the Soul:
The deep suffering of the soul … comes not so much from the aridity she must endure but from this growing suspicion that she has lost her way. She thinks that all spiritual blessing is over and that God has abandoned her. She finds neither support nor delight in holy things. Growing weary, she struggles in vain to practice the [prayer methods] that used to yield results.
John of the Cross encourages those experiencing this dark night to trust the silence that comes when we surrender our need to speak to God using words:
This is no time for discursive meditation. Instead, the soul must surrender into peace and quietude, even if she is convinced she is doing nothing and wasting time. She might assume that this lack of desire to think about anything is a sure sign of her laziness. But simple patience and perseverance in a state of formless prayerfulness, while doing nothing, accomplishes great things.
All that is required here is to set her soul free, unencumbered, to let her take a break from ideas and knowledge, to quit troubling herself about thinking and meditating. The soul must content herself with a loving attentiveness toward God, without agitation, without effort, without the desire to taste or feel [God]. These urges only disquiet and distract the soul from the peaceful quietude and sweet ease inherent in the gift of contemplation being offered.
The soul might continue to have qualms about wasting time. She may wonder if it would not be better to be doing something else, since she cannot think or activate anything in prayer. Let her bear these doubts calmly. There is no other way to go to prayer now than to surrender to this sweet ease and breadth of spirit. If the soul tries to engage her interior faculties to accomplish something, she will squander the goodness God is instilling in her through the peace in which she is simply resting….
The best thing for the soul to do is to pay no attention to the fact that the actions of her faculties are slipping away…. She needs to get out of the way. In peaceful plentitude, let her now say “yes” to the infused contemplation God is bestowing upon her…. Contemplation is nothing other than a secret, peaceful, loving inflow of God. If given room, it will fire the soul in the spirit of love.
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What Happens in Prayer is None of My Business
On releasing control, trusting divine mystery, and letting go of results
“What happens in prayer is none of my business. It’s God’s business.”
—Thomas Keating
Often in my contemplative prayer practice, I expect something to happen. On the lofty spectrum of possibilities, I hope to experience oneness with God, if only for a fleeting moment. Or maybe I will feel myself radically embraced by divine love—again, if only for a moment. On the more practical side of things, at the very least, I hope to emerge from 20-30 minutes of silence refreshed, less reactive, and more centered.
Inevitably, though, something smaller and simpler happens. It could be that I sit there in prayer, snagged by an obsessive thought for nearly the whole time. Each time I attempt to let it go, or say a verse of a Psalm to refocus my attention on God, it pops up again, like a game of whack-a-mole. It could be something I’m supposed to do that day at work or a household task like confirming kids’ doctor appointments. I attempt to let it go and recommit to the silent stillness at hand—or, on less-centered days, I even send myself a quick email reminder.
There are days when I feel incredibly buoyed by prayer, when a snippet of Scripture from lectio divina resonates through my heart for the day, and when I know experientially that I am loved and supported by God. But mostly, my contemplative prayer consists of showing up to God as I am, hurried, relaxed, anxious, happy, frustrated, or whatever, intending but not fully succeeding in practicing receptivity to God’s still presence—and then moving on to the next part of my day. What’s more is that at the end of my meditation sit, I am rarely changed in an overt way. Even if I do feel an encouraging peace or an awareness of deep love, it isn’t some magical alchemy that protects me from, say, reacting defensively to my wife or kids ten minutes later.
This lack of observable outcome—at least in the short term—is why I trust the mystery of Thomas Keating’s quote. Maybe it is not mine to know what is going on in the first place?
Prayer is rarely dramatic. It is showing up to God as I am.
I experience two temptations in prayer. The first is to treat prayer like a technique. If I perform such and such steps, I will succeed in making God’s love more available to me—as if it could be more available than it already is in every moment. If I chant the right number of Psalms, sit in silence in the right way, witness and detach from my thoughts with the right consciousness, inner peace and divine love will be mine. But that treats prayer as a commodity, as a formula that can be applied and with results that are measurable. And prayer doesn’t work that way, because God doesn’t work that way. I can do all the “right” things in prayer and still not experience equanimity after a prayer session. I can do prayer in all the “wrong” ways and still taste peace. Sometimes when I don’t pray in a formal way at all, such as when I’m at the movies, doing dishes, making food, jogging with my wife, or walking my dog, the expansiveness of divine love and peace opens up before me, and often when I least expect it.
The second temptation in prayer is to expect results, like those I shared above. But to reduce prayer to a technique or to expect certain results is to make prayer about me, and not about God—about self-realization instead of self-transcendence (a distinction made by Benedictine Michael Casey in his book Strangers to the City). It’s to think I can track the movements of the soul, as if I can log it in an app, when the wild mercy of God often leaves no trace. Prayer is not about achieving anything, but about allowing God’s action within us, even when it seems like nothing is happening—and even when I’m not allowing God’s action, but instead want to allow it, but unsuccessfully. As Merton said, “Even the desire to please you does in fact please you.” Even the desire to allow God’s action invites God’s mysterious work in my inner life.
There’s another danger inherent here, too, which is to make contemplative prayer, at least as I practice it in the Christian tradition, into therapeutic self-care. I’m all about therapy, self-care, and self-help. I’ll take all the care and help I can get! But to turn contemplative prayer into a technique or result is also to privatize it, whereas Jesus’ message is all about solidarity, especially with those who are suffering the most. This is why I believe that Christian contemplative prayer also has to end with mystical, political solidarity and not simply my individual happiness. Because otherwise it doesn’t really have much to do with Jesus. (See this post and this post for more on that topic).
