The issue in prayer is not to pray because we are certain, but to pray because we are uncertain.
—Renita Weems, Listening for God
The Methodist minister Renita Weems was questioned about prayer by a woman no longer practicing her Christian faith:
“What sense is there in praying if you don’t believe in God?”… She sounded pensive.
“You pray in order to believe,” I answered.
“That sounds backwards to me. What’s the sense in praying if you don’t believe?”
“Sometimes you can’t wait for your mind to catch up. Sometimes the heart has to take the initiative.… Even when I don’t, or can’t, believe, I still believe that it’s important to believe,” I heard myself saying. “That’s enough to keep me stammering my prayers.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that you have doubts yourself?… [Why] don’t you just walk away from it?”…
“For the same reason I don’t walk away from any of the myriad things I’ve committed myself to. I don’t want to live my life based solely on my feelings. Feelings change from one moment to the next. I don’t walk away from my marriage just because I don’t love my husband today. Eventually it returns…. I continue to pray until the belief returns.”
Weems reflects on the conversation:
Whatever spirituality is, it is not something to be discovered. It is something to be recovered—something you misplace and recover a thousand times in a lifetime. Nor is belief in God, mystery, or prayer something one either possesses or doesn’t. Rather, belief is something one tries continually to keep oneself open to, accessible to, or something one continually refuses to open oneself up to. The only difference between … [the two of us] was that I still wanted to remain open. Open to what? Open to the possibility that there was something more to life than my vanity, something more than what I could manipulate or grasp…. As inadequate as I felt that day … I wanted to remain open to the possibility that there was something nobler in life than what I could see or touch.
Sometimes we awaken to it through nature. Sometimes it comes to us through art, music, dance, or silence. Sometimes we are reminded of it by interacting with or observing children. Sometimes we happen upon it through chance encounters with strangers. And for a moment, we are smitten with the sublime. And then we lose it. We lose its scent, we can’t make out its sound. Sometimes we stumble around for what feels like days, months, perhaps years, trying to recapture it—trying to pick back up the scent, trying to make out the sounds. But even though we find ourselves stumbling, we’re onto something.
References:
Renita J. Weems, Listening for God: A Minister’s Journey Through Silence and Doubt (Touchstone, 2000), 43–44, 46, 47.
Image Credit and Inspiration: Richárd Ecsedi, untitled (detail), 2019, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We trust the way forward even as the unexpected appears just beyond the edges of the map.
