When You Cannot Pray
Harold Ivan Smith, D.Min., FT
If only I had a dollar for every time I have heard a griever say, “I just cannot pray. The words will not come.” Moreover, periodically I have acknowledged my own inability to pray. One father, a minister, told me that he could not pray for years after his adolescent died. Certainly, he did liturgical prayers and prayer for the sick and dying but he could never acknowledge his own needs and feelings in prayer. “I feel like a hypocrite,” he mumbled.
I often recommend that grievers borrow from other traditions when they are stuck. I value this acknowledging phrase from The Book of Common Prayer. “Help us, in the midst of things we do not understand . . . .” After some illnesses and deaths there is much that grievers cannot understand. The dominant repeating prayer is, “Why?” or “Why!!!?”
For individuals in faith traditions that prefer spontaneous prayer, “I cannot pray” indicts the individual. One woman told me that it is all she can do to show up and see if “God has anything to say to me.”
Some have never understood prayer from the perspective of James Kimpton.
Prayer “refreshes me and gives me the grace to step into the dark.” Prayer gives some the courage to do things they, otherwise, could not do.
Some grievers sing prayers. In the African American tradition gospel songs like “Kumbaya” and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand. . . .” have become sung prayer for many grievers. Many were moved by Mahalia Jackson’s prayerful singing of “Precious Lord,” at Martin Luther King’s funeral.
For some grievers, prayer is punctuated with anger. Doris Grumback, in her memoir, Coming into the End Zone, unleashes her anger at God following her young editor’s prolonged illness and death, “I am too angry with the God I trusted to save him, to lift his affliction.” I suggest that grievers acknowledge anger and count it as prayer. I know some readers can identify with Grumback’s confession. Grumback demonstrates that it is permissible to be angry at God and still be faithful. It is also permissible to be angry at others seemingly untouched by, or insensitive to, the raw realities and upheavals of grief, or who have forgotten promises made to be supportive. It is okay to “name names” in prayer but to add, “God, help me to understand [Name]’s failure to follow through with her/his promises. . . .”
Charles Williams, the trusted friend of C.S. Lewis, once commented on
anger-tinted prayer, “If one wants ‘to carry hot complaints to the very
Throne,’ that is a “permitted absurdity.”
In the ancient story of Job, divine wrath did not fall on Job but rather on
his would-be comforters. Sometimes the most authentic prayer is, “O, God. .
. .”
The Book of Revelation offers a promise of a magnificent eternal moment, when one of the elders will ask, “These in white robes–who are they, and where did they come from?” He is told, “They who have come out of the great ordeal” [Revelation 7:14, Revised English Version]. Kimberly Bracken Long, comments, “Perhaps these are the ones who have lived through more than their share of suffering, and have finally been released.”
Finally, crying is a form of a griever’s prayer. Jewish philosopher Leo Rosten contends, “A place in heaven is reserved for those who cry but cannot pray.”
This article appeared in Journeys - November 2005.
