Praying in the Desert

Theological niceties were of little use to me when I entered the Sahara of the heart.

It has been seven years since a major new work has come from the pen of Richard Foster. In Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (to be released in September by HarperSanFrancisco), Foster examines a variety of ways to pray. In the excerpt that follows, he discusses one of these, the Prayer of the Forsaken.

To come to the pleasure you have not you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

—Saint John of the Cross

Sometimes it seems as if God is hidden from us. We do everything we know. We pray. We serve. We worship. We live as faithfully as we can. And still there is nothing—nothing! It feels as though we are “beating on Heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark,” to use the words of preacher George Buttrick. Times of seeming desertion and absence and abandonment appear to be universal among those who walk the path of faith.

I am not talking about a true absence, of course, but rather a sense of absence. God is always present with us—we know that theologically—but there are times when he withdraws our consciousness of his presence.

But these theological niceties are of little help to us when we enter the Sahara of the heart. Here we experience real spiritual desolation. We feel abandoned by friends, spouse, and God. Every hope evaporates the moment we reach for it. We question, we doubt, we struggle. We pray and the words feel rote. We turn to the Bible and find it meaningless. We turn to music and it fails to move us. We seek the fellowship of other Christians and discover only backbiting, selfishness, and egoism.

One metaphor for these experiences of forsakenness is the desert. It is an apt image, for we indeed feel dry, barren, parched. With the psalmist we cry out, “0 my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer” (Ps. 22:2, NIV). We may even wonder if there is a God to answer.

What can be said as we face—as we sometimes must—the barren wasteland of God’s absence?

A Major Highway

The first word that should be spoken is one of encouragement. We are not on a rabbit trail, but a major highway. Many have traveled this way before us. Think of Moses exiled from Egypt’s splendor, waiting year after silent year for God to deliver his people. Think of the psalmist’s plaintive cry to God, “Why have you forgotten me?” (Ps. 42:9, NIV). Think of Elijah in a desolate cave keeping a lonely vigil over wind and earthquake and fire. Think of Jeremiah lowered into a dungeon well until he “sank in the mire.” Think of Mary’s lonely vigil at Golgotha. Think of those solitary words atop Golgotha, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Christians through the centuries have witnessed the same experience. Saint John of the Cross named it “the dark night of the soul.” An anonymous English writer called it “the cloud of unknowing.” George Fox said, “When it was day I wished for night, and when it was night I wished for day.”

To be faced with what one writer called the “withering winds of God’s hiddenness” does not mean that God is displeased with you, or that you are insensitive to the work of God’s Spirit, or that you have committed some horrendous offense against heaven, or anything. Darkness is a part of our experience of prayer. It is to be expected, even embraced.

The Tailor-Made Journey

The second thing to be said about our experience of abandonment is that every faith journey is tailor-made. Our sense of God’s absence does not come to us in any preset timetable. We simply cannot draw some universal road map that everyone will be able to follow.

It is true that those in the first flush of faith often are given unusual graces of the Spirit, just as a new baby is cuddled and pampered. It is also true that some of the deepest experiences of alienation and separation from God have come to those who have traveled far into the interior realms of faith. But we can enter the deserts of barrenness and the canyons of anguish at any number of points in our sojourn.

Since there is no special sequence in the life of prayer, we simply do not move from one stage to the next knowing, for example, that at stages 5 and 12 we will experience abandonment by God. It would be easier that way, but then we would be describing a mechanical arrangement, not a relationship.

A Living Relationship

That is the next thing that should be said about our sense of the absence of God: We are entering into a living relationship that begins and develops in mutual freedom. God grants us perfect freedom because he desires creatures that freely choose to be in relationship with him. Through what I call the Prayer of the Forsaken, we learn to give to God the same freedom. Relationship of this kind can never be forced.

If we could make a creator of heaven and earth appear at our beck and call, we would not be in communion with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We do that with objects or idols. But God, the great iconoclast, is constantly smashing our false images of who he is and what he is like.

Can you see how our very sense of the absence of God is, therefore, an unsuspected grace? In the very act of hiddenness, God is slowly weaning us of fashioning him in our own image. Like Aslan, the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, God is wild and free and comes at will. By refusing to be a puppet on our string or a genie in our bottle, God frees us from our false, idolatrous images.

Anatomy Of An Absence

I recall very clearly a time I entered the Prayer of the Forsaken. By every outward standard, things were going well. Publishers wanted me to write for them. Speaking invitations were too numerous and too gracious. Yet it became clear to me through a series of events that God wanted me to retreat from public activity. In essence, God said, “Keep quiet!” And so I did. I stopped all public speaking. I stopped all writing. And I waited. At the time this began, I did not know if I would ever speak or write again; I rather thought I would not. As it turned out, this “fast” from public life lasted about 18 months.

I waited in silence. And God was silent, too. I joined in the psalmist’s query, “How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 13:1, NIV). The answer: nothing. Absolutely nothing! There were no sudden revelations. No penetrating insights. Not even gentle assurances. Nothing.

Have you ever been there? Perhaps for you it was the tragic death of a child or spouse that plunged you into the desolate desert of God’s absence. Maybe it was a crisis in marriage or vocation. Or a failure in business. Then again, perhaps there was no dramatic event at all—you simply slipped from the warm glow of intimate communion to the icy cold of nothing. At least “nothing” is how it feels—if there are feelings at all.

My 18-month discipline of silence ended finally and simply with gentle assurances that it was time for me to reenter the public square.

The Purifying Silence

As best I can discern, the silence of God month after weary month was a purifying silence. I say “as best I can discern” because the purifying was not dramatic or even recognizable at the time. It was a little like a child that you don’t realize has grown at all until you measure her against the mark made last year on the hallway doorjamb.

Saint John of the Cross says that two purifications occur in the dark night of the soul, and in some measure, I experienced both. The first involves stripping us of dependence upon exterior results. We find ourselves less and less impressed with the religion of the “big deal”—big buildings, big budgets, big productions, big miracles. Not that there is anything wrong with big things, only that they are no longer what impress us. Nor are we drawn toward praise and adulation. Not that there is anything wrong with kind and gracious remarks, only that they are no longer what move us.

Then, too, we become deadened to that impressive corpus of religious response to God. Liturgical practices, sacramental symbols, aids to prayer, books on personal fulfillment, private devotional exercises—all of these become as mere ashes in our hands. Not that there is anything wrong with acts of devotion, only that they are no longer what fascinate us.

The final stripping of dependence upon exterior results comes as we become less in control of our destiny, and more at the mercy of others. Saint John calls this the “passive dark night.” It is the condition of Peter, who once girded himself and went where he wanted, but in time found that others girded him and took him where he did not want to go (John 21:18–19).

For me, the greatest value in my lack of control was the intimate and ultimate awareness that I could not manage God. God refused to jump when I said, “Jump!” Neither by theological acumen nor technique could I conquer God. God was, in fact, to conquer me.

The second purifying of Saint John involves stripping us of dependence upon interior results. This is more disturbing and painful than the first purification because it threatens us at the root of all we believe in and have given ourselves to. In the beginning, we become less and less sure of the inner workings of the Spirit. It is not that we disbelieve in God, but more profoundly, we wonder what kind of God we believe in. Is God good and intent upon our goodness, or is God cruel and a tyrant?

We discover that the workings of faith, hope, and love become themselves subject to doubt. Our personal motivations become suspect. We worry whether this act or that thought is inspired by fear, vanity, and arrogance rather than faith, hope, and love.

Like a frightened child, we walk cautiously through the dark mists that now surround the Holy of Holies. We become tentative and unsure of ourselves. Nagging questions assail us with a force they never had before. “Is prayer only a psychological trick?” “Does evil ultimately win out?” “Is there any real meaning in the universe?” “Does God really love me?”

Through all of this, paradoxically, God is purifying our faith by threatening to destroy it. We are led to a profound and holy distrust of all superficial drives and human strivings. We know more deeply than ever before our huge capacity for self-deception. Slowly we are weaned from vain securities and false allegiances. Our trust in all exterior and interior results is shattered so that we can learn faith in God alone. Through our barrenness of soul God produces detachment, humility, patience, and perseverance.

Most surprising of all, our very dryness produces the habit of prayer in us. All distractions are gone. Even all warm fellowship has disappeared. We have become focused. The soul is parched. And thirsty. And this thirst can lead us to prayer. I say “can” because it can also lead us to despair or simply to abandon the search.

The Prayer Of Complaint

What can we do during these times of abandonment? Is there any kind of prayer we can engage in when we feel forsaken? Yes, we can begin by praying the Prayer of Complaint. This form of prayer has been largely lost in our modern, sanitized religion, but the Bible abounds with it.

The best way I know to relearn this time-honored approach to God is by praying that part of the Psalter traditionally known as the “Lament Psalms.” The ancient singers really knew how to complain, and their words of anguish and frustration can guide our lips into the prayer we dare not pray alone. They expressed reverence and disappointment: “God whom I praise, break your silence” (Ps. 109:1, JB). They experienced dogged hope and mounting despair: “I am here, calling for your help, praying to you every morning: why do you reject me? Why do you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 88:13–14, JB). They had confidence in the character of God and exasperation at the inaction of God: “I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’ ” (Ps. 42:9, NIV).

The Lament Psalms teach us to pray our inner conflicts and contradictions. They allow us to shout out our cries of forsakenness in the caverns of abandonment and then hear the echo return to us over and over until we recant of them, only to shout them out again. These psalms give us permission to shake our fist at God one moment and break into doxology the next.

Short Darts Of Longing Love

A second thing we can do when buffeted by God’s silence is to confront the cloud of unknowing with what one spiritual writer called “a short dart of longing love.” We may not see the end from the beginning, but we keep on doing what we know to do. We pray, we listen, we worship, we carry out the duty of the present moment. What we learned to do in the light of God’s love, we also do in the dark of God’s absence. We ask and continue to ask, even though there is no answer. We seek and continue to seek, even though we do not find. We knock and continue to knock, even though the door remains shut.

This constant, longing love produces a firmness of life orientation in us. We love God more than the gifts God brings. Like Job, we serve God even if he slays us. Like Mary, we say freely, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38, NIV). This is a wonderful grace.

Trust Precedes Faith

I offer one more counsel to those who find themselves devoid of the presence of God: Wait on God, silent and still, attentive and responsive. Learn that trust precedes faith. Faith is a little like putting your car into gear. When you are unable to put your spiritual life into drive, don’t put it into reverse; put it into neutral. Trust is how to put your spiritual life in neutral. Trust is confidence in the character of God. Firmly and deliberately say, “I do not understand what God is doing or even where God is, but I know that he is out to do me good.” This is how to wait.

I do not fully understand the reasons for the wildernesses of God’s absence. This I do know: While the wilderness is necessary, it is never meant to be permanent. In God’s time and in God’s way, the desert will give way to a land flowing with milk and honey. And as we wait for that promised land of the soul, we can echo the prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux: “O my God, deep calls unto deep [Ps. 42:7]. The deep of my profound misery calls to the deep of Your infinite mercy.”

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