"You pray before battle"
Last week I was praying about how I’m bad at praying. (I use the word “praying” loosely here; “whining in God’s general direction” would be a better term.) I was walking around as I cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, half-consciously thinking stuff like, “I dunno, I do try pray, but I always get distracted, or I forget, or I just don’t feel like it. Actually, let’s be real, it’s usually that I just don’t feel like it…”
I try to “pray without ceasing,” turning to God regularly as I go about my days, but lately I’d been increasingly apathetic about having any kind of set prayer time where I give God 100% of my attention. Even though I recognized that when I pray the Liturgy of the Hours it helps me on every level, even when I tried setting simpler goals like just focusing on freeform prayer for five minutes per day, it still wasn’t happening. And so I found myself whining about it in the kitchen one night last week.
And, to my surprise, I got an answer.
In the midst of my unfocused rambling, a loud message interrupted all my other thoughts and got my full attention. I guess it could have been from my subconscious, but it really seemed like one of those moments of “hearing” God since it came out of the blue and was so foreign to all my other thoughts. It said:
You pray before battle.
What? I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I responded prayerfully: “Huh?”
I heard it again. As I rinsed dishes and swept the floor, I thought about what that meant in relation to my struggles with prayer. Then I realized:
If I were going into battle tomorrow — a real battle, facing bloodshed and mortal danger — I would pray. I wouldn’t have to remind myself why it’s important. I wouldn’t whine about it. I wouldn’t drag my feet. And I dang sure wouldn’t forget.
In fact, if I were doing anything of great importance, I would naturally turn to prayer. Let’s say, for example, that Oprah invited me on her show to make the case for orthodox Christianity, or that I had a chance to meet with an influential politician to talk to him or her about an issue that’s important to me. Not only would I not forget to pray beforehand, but you’d hardly be able to get me to do anything else.
A big problem with my prayer life is that I’d stopped feeling like I do anything important on a day-to-day basis. Now, I’ve always known that my job is the most important job in the world; I’ve never doubted that my role as a mother is critical in the grand scheme of things. But on the average day? Hmm. Not so much.
Somewhere along the way my attitude had become saturated with ennui, and I came to see my days as consisting of “make breakfast,” “clean up after breakfast,” “try to keep the house from getting destroyed between breakfast and lunch,” “make lunch,” and so on. Not very exciting. I’d made the dangerous mistake of forgetting that every day is a battle, a war of good against evil, that every time I choose love instead of sin it’s a victory on a cosmic level that I can’t imagine. There are always opportunities to step out of my comfort zone in trust in God, to serve in ways I’ve never served before, to bless other people with the love of God — and that’s on days when I don’t leave the house! It’s a vicious cycle, really: the more I skip prayer and lose touch with God, the more I forget that the Christian life is always the exciting life, regardless of your external circumstances.
As the new year rolls around, I think that one of my biggest goals is simply to break out of this lackadaisical approach to daily life and renew my understanding that every day really is an opportunity to fight a glorious battle. Anyone have any advice?
Doubt after atheism
Occasionally I’m asked if I ever have doubts about God’s existence since my conversion to Christianity from lifelong atheism. The answer isn’t a clear yes or a clear no, because I’ve found that there are different types of doubt. In my experience, here’s how it’s broken down:
1. Doubt based on failure of imagination
There is a certain type of surprisingly painful doubt that could be broadly described as “failure of imagination.” I will be honest and say that there have been moments when I’m talking with God in prayer or asking for the intercession of some saint and that old, comfortable atheistic way of thinking flashes back to mind, and I pause and think, “This is ridiculous.” It’s all so difficult to imagine. The God who loves me yet seems so hidden, the saints in heaven, the angels watching over us — what outlandish concepts! Having lived my entire life as an atheist up until relatively recently, it’s very easy to just take the world at face value and imagine that there is nothing else to it other than what we see in the material world.
Sometimes these moments of doubt even stretch out for weeks or months, and it makes for a lonely, dry (and, honestly, kind of boring) spiritual life. It’s no fun. But what it ultimately comes down to is not receiving consolation combined with a failure of imagination: God is allowing me to have a spiritual dry spell in the sense that I don’t “feel” his presence, and I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of an afterlife or conceive of God or think up good answers to every single mystery of the faith. The concepts are so different and huge, they stretch my mind’s ability to grasp them.
Since the normal way I engage with the world is either to directly observe the things around me or at least be able to imagine them (say, with atoms or radio waves or other unseen things), it’s easy to have a poorly-thought-out gut reaction of throwing up my hands and saying, “If I can’t see it or imagine it, it must not be there!” And that’s where this type of doubt comes from.
2. Doubt based on irrational frustration
In some ways my spiritual ineptitude and stubborn refusal to rely on God has benefited me in this area, because there have only been a few times that I’ve experienced this. But when I do, it’s usually an emotional, intense form of doubt.
It comes about when I have asked God for something that I really wanted — maybe I even felt certain that I’d received some message in prayer that he was going to give it to me — and then it doesn’t work out. There’s this feeling of, “I was really, really, really counting on you, God, and you let me down,” which, if I’m particularly upset, can easily verge into, “…so maybe you just don’t exist.” It stems from some mix of resentment, frustration and refusal to trust that God’s plan might be better than mine.
Luckily I’m usually able to recognize this form of doubt and quickly banish it based on how totally irrational it is — after all, it is not a tenet of the faith that praying to God is like giving orders to a waiter in a restaurant who will run off and get you what you asked for. Not getting something you prayed for, even if you really needed or wanted it, is to be expected in the Christian life. The problem is not that God doesn’t exist or isn’t listening, but that none of us knows all the details of his will for the world — but we can take comfort in knowing that God can bring good from any situation. (This book is a great source of inspiration on that subject if anyone else struggles with that.)
3. Doubt based on lack of compelling evidence
This is the one type of doubt that I have not experienced since converting to Christianity. One of the benefits of converting entirely based on study, not having a single “religious experience,” is that my decision to become a Catholic Christian was simply because that’s where the data led me. Though at first it bothered me because it was a very dry kind of faith, it’s ended up benefitting me because my beliefs were founded on nothing other than an observation that this belief system was far more reasonable than any other.
It wasn’t that I found atheism to be entirely unreasonable; it’s that I found Christianity to be more reasonable. Obviously I couldn’t prove in a laboratory that all the Christian claims were true, but I found that it offered enough compelling evidence to back up the claims of its origins, as well as an overall worldview that was a better “box top” to the puzzle of life and the universe than what atheism offered.
Elizabeth Esther recently wrote a brutally honest post about doubt keeping her up at night; I can honestly say that I haven’t experienced this. I think that that’s one of the big upsides of having such a boring conversion: if I’m lying awake at night and experience the first two types of doubt, I can recognize them for what they are — a failure of imagination or an irrational response to not getting my way. Then I recall the reasons I converted in the first place, mentally reviewing the bookshelves full of books that led me to where I am today. I think of how every single time I have asked a tough question and compared the atheist answer to the Catholic answer, I have only grown more confident in my faith. I ask myself: “Do I really think that atheism is more reasonable than Catholic Christianity?” Even when I’m feeling fatigued by spiritual dryness, frustrated by not being able to understand how it all works or even angry at God’s silence, that question always leads me to just smile, roll over and go to sleep.
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The ignorable God
One of the things that bothered me most when I was first exploring religion was the fact that God is invisible. As I was reading up on Christianity, struggling with concepts I didn’t understand, I would occasionally think in exasperation, “You know, God could make this really easy and just appear to each one of us individually and settle all of this once and for all!” It seemed so much more efficient for God to do that rather than mess around with all this messy organized religion stuff.
I eventually understood that God’s highest purpose is not efficiency, and the more I studied the history of his gradual revelation to humans, the more it seemed clear that one of his purposes in remaining hidden was to bring people together. Once I understood him as the God of love, it made sense that he would want us to reach out to one another rather than communicate exclusively with him.
That mostly satisfied me, but I always had a lingering frustration that God didn’t do a little more to make his presence just a little more obvious. For example, maybe Bibles could glow every time they were opened, or the wine could actually turn into a different-looking substance when it was consecrated into the Precious Blood at the Mass. Not that this would convince all skeptics (since, as I learned, you won’t see God if you’re determined not to), but it would certainly be a nice consolation for those of us who believed anyway!
A couple weeks ago I was in Adoration, and all these feelings bubbled up anew and began to bother me. I looked up at the consecrated Host in the monstrance, which I know to be the actual body of Christ, no different than if he were standing there to shake my hand. I hate to admit this, but I felt so frustrated that it was just sitting there.
“Where is your visible majesty?!” I thought. “You’re God. Why doesn’t the Host glow or the earth shake every time the priest puts it in the monstrance? Why doesn’t a blinding beam of light shoot out to awe everyone in attendance? Why are you so hidden?”
Long having given up on getting answers to these questions, I let those thoughts go and got out my rosary to start praying about something else. Then, out of the blue, I heard an answer (here’s what I mean when I say I “heard” it). I was suddenly hit with the thought:
He’s not hidden. He’s ignorable.
Ignorable. That was exactly the understanding I’d been searching for, one that made so many things make sense. When I thought about it, God is not really hidden. Evidence of his existence is all around us, everywhere we look. The obvious design in nature, the human soul that is like nothing else in the animal kingdom, his Church that has stood continuously for 2,000 years while empire after empire has fallen away around it, his Scriptures whose original content has been remarkably well-preserved over the millennia, the fact that something exists instead of nothing — we’re surrounded by Exhibit A for God’s existence. When you look at the world prayerfully, calmly, and through a lens of love, God seems anything but hidden.
But he is, no doubt, ignorable.
As I know all too well, he does nothing to demand my attention when I decide that I’d rather focus on worldly pursuits rather than on him. When I choose to think only of myself and my selfish wants instead of him, he does nothing to stop me. It is stunning, really, the humility of a God who lets us do that.
And why? Why not take my suggestion and slap me upside the head with a laser-light show at every Mass to command my attention when my mind has wandered to think about everything but him? I’m no theologian and don’t claim to have all the answers on that one, but I think that one part of it is this: as usual, it’s about love. One thing about love is that it must be a choice; if there’s coercion involved, it’s not real love. And in order to love someone — really, truly love them — you must first have the choice to ignore them.
The greatest nothing I ever felt
When I first stepped into the chapel at my Christ Renews His Parish retreat this weekend, I felt a sense of nervous anticipation. My eyes gradually adjusted to the candle-lit room as we all filed into the pews for a moment of Adoration, and I gazed up at the monstrance on the altar. The movement of the swaying candlelight lent an ethereal feel to the room, and the ancient sounds of Gregorian chant lifted us out of the building off of I-35 in twenty-first century America and took us to some place where time and place were irrelevant and only God mattered.
If I were ever going to have a religious experience, it would be here.
Other women began to sniffle and lean their heads on the pews, and I grabbed a couple Kleenex from the box next to me for when my own powerful experience began. As regular readers know, God rarely speaks to me so clearly as when I’m in Adoration (as I talked about in my posts about the Adoration list and my moment of surrender on food issues), and it seemed inevitable that going to Adoration in such a beautiful chapel surrounded by such God-loving women at such a Christ-centered retreat would leave me open to the Lord’s promptings as never before. I crossed myself, prayed, gazed at the monstrance, and waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
I felt nothing, I heard nothing, so I said another prayer asking God to speak to me. I even did that thing where I make my inner chatterbox shut up for a minute so that I can just listen and see where the Lord seems to be leading my thoughts. Still nothing. My thoughts were only led to the facts that I had a slight headache and the room was cold.
When I looked up at the monstrance, I did not sense the Lord’s presence at all. If I am to be totally honest, my gut reaction was, “That really does look like it’s just a wafer.”
I leaned back in the pew, tucking my Kleenex into my pocket since I obviously wouldn’t be needing it, and looked around the room, casually glancing from the typed note about conserving energy on the thermostat to a clump of dust hanging from the ceiling.
As the minutes ticked past and I remained entirely unmoved by the experience, I waited for the inevitable frustration to bubble up within me. Based on how it usually goes, this was the part where I was supposed to silently rage at God, asking why I cannot hear his voice when so many other people seem to be able to, begging him to give me some sort of sign that he is there, demanding that he make me overcome with excitement every time my eyes fall on his Presence in the monstrance. I waited and waited, but it never came.
I felt fine. Actually, I felt great. I might not have had the pleasant emotions I wanted, but I had something else…perhaps, to my surprise, something even better.
It occurred to me that the knowledge and experiences God has given me over the past few years, along with the grace of the sacraments, has left me in a place that is best described not in terms of belief versus doubt, but simply in terms of awareness. Sometimes through reading and thinking, sometimes through great “coincidences” and seeing his hand at work in my life, I’ve been brought to a place where I no longer even think of it in terms of whether or not God exists — “exists” being a weak word with an obvious antonym, implying that nonexistence is possible. To say that something “exists” usually has the unspoken implication of a transitory state, since every material thing in the universe will eventually cease to exist. Duck-billed platypuses exist; spiral galaxies exist; I exist. The English language doesn’t have a proper word to describe the state of being of God, who always was and always will be, who is more real than reality, other than to simply say that God is.
I realized that this relatively new understanding of God gave me a certain kind of joy. It wasn’t a shout-from-the-rooftops, overwhelming kind of joy borne of a powerful visceral reaction to some event; rather, it was the calm, steady, quiet joy borne of knowledge of the truth. In place of the feelings I might have hoped for, I felt a great freedom — an emancipation from emotion.
Who knows why I couldn’t hear God’s voice or feel his presence the way I often do in Adoration: maybe I was too tired, maybe it was the headache, maybe there was a reason God wasn’t speaking to me the same way he usually does. But a smile spread across my face when I realized it didn’t matter, and it never would. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me until that moment, but there in that pew I could finally appreciate just how liberating it is to know that my fickle emotions change not a single thing about God. So often I had often carried with me, hidden in the back of my mind, a worry about future spiritual dry spells. “What if I don’t feel God at work in my life next week? What if I face a problem and it doesn’t seem like God is there? What if I go to Adoration and I don’t feel anything?” My whole body physically relaxed as I let those worries pour out of me.
As I looked up at what looked like just a wafer in the monstrance, again feeling nothing inside, I felt the quiet peace, the silent joy of being able to rest in the knowledge that its power comes not from how I feel about, but from what — or, rather who – it is. I basked in the presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament and all around me, aware of him not because I felt him, but because he was there.