On the Sheer Terror of Perceived Silence

Learning to pray amid doubt

[Note: I am here returning my Theology Thursday writing attention to flesh out the lessons I learned after publishing my book After Doubt on the experiences of doubt and deconstruction. I’m particularly grateful to a few cherished Facebook followers for helping me think through some of the questions people face around prayer and doubt for this piece. As always, I hope it is helpful. Cheers! Oh, and this is a longer-than-usual piece.]

Since his untimely death in 1996, the spiritual writings of Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) have nourished the hearts and minds of millions. Nouwen was a noted writer. But it was the spiritual rawness that permeated his life’s work that continues to inspire each new generation with an uncommon luminescence. No doubt, Nouwen enjoyed tremendous success through his teaching, writing and speaking at prestigious institutions such as Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale during the first half of his career. But only after a significant personal, emotional, and psychological break did Nouwen begin his life’s most important work. Nouwen eventually left his post in the academy. And he spent the rest of his life serving those with intellectual disabilities. The rest of his life was a sustained pursuit of quietly mastering true greatness: the art of being loved by God. 

The last decade of Nouwen’s life was marked by an unbound pursuit of God. Much of the writings from these years narrate not only his own emotional turmoil and perceived sense of failure; they were equally colored by a vulnerable tumult of wrestling with internal sexual desires that Nouwen knew did not align with the way of Jesus. Mainly, they offer us a unique glimpse into his prayer life. One such book, The Inner Voice of Love (1996), was posthumously dubbed his ‘secret journals’ by his publisher. The prayers found within expose before us the life of prayer Nouwen pursued as he sought to experience the unbounded love of God that singularly gave his life purpose.

But they are not what one would expect. One may suspect that Nouwen would discover tranquility and emotional peace with as he entered a life centered on prayer. Quite the opposite. It is not a little surprising to find that the tone and tenor of Nouwen’s secret prayer journal during these final ten years of his life were less than tranquil and certain. Sure, he’d learned to pray. But his prayers are matched with waves of unmistakable and unquestionable doubt and personal angst. Listen to some of Nouwen’s language in these vulnerable prayers: 

• “It is not going to be easy to listen to God’s call. Your insecurity, your self-doubt, and your great need for affirmation make you lose trust in your inner voice and run away from yourself. But you know that God speaks to you through your inner voice and that you will find joy and peace only if you follow it. Yes, your spirit is willing to follow, but your flesh is weak.” (p. 89)

• “What is important is to keep clinging to the real, lasting, and unambiguous love of Jesus. Whenever you doubt that love, return to your inner spiritual home and listen there to love's voice. Only when you know in your deepest being that you are intimately loved can you face the dark voices of the enemy without being seduced by them.” (p. 93)

• “You are constantly facing choices. The question is whether you choose for God or for your own doubting self. You know what the right choice is, but your emotions, passions, and feelings keep suggesting you choose the self-rejecting way. The root choice is to trust at all times that God is with you and will give you what you most need.” (p. 131)

For Nouwen, what appears most clear is the reality that entering into a life of prayer actually forced him to come face-to-face with his own doubts—doubts with God, doubts with himself, doubts with faith in general. As, I’ve come to believe, it will with us. The general sentiment among many Christians these days is that if we can do the hard work and truly into a life of sustained prayer, then it is presumed we would expect to find an oasis of tranquility, purpose, and perhaps even revival. Too often we begin searching for these things only to soon recognize that we are ‘using’ prayer for something other than coming face-to-face with God. How often in Christian subculture are we quick to believe that if we truly learn to pray, then, there, in our newfound intimacy with God, we will find the worldly peace our hearts have longed for? 

Nouwen didn’t seem to find it. In fact, what Nouwen experienced is so much closer to what I observe with people who learn how to pray. In the years after writing my book After Doubt, an endless array of stories and questions have come to me about how people often experience doubt, particularly as they enter into the discipline of prayer. Prayer and doubt—seemingly interconnected—continued to come up time and time again. 

How could someone experience doubt through prayer? 

One of the recurring accounts by those who enter into a life of prayer is that they often feel unheard by God. That is, they can often feel as though they are talking to a cold, unoccupied sky. Or someone who never seems to talk back. On one level, this exposes us to the fact that we can tend to place expectations on God to talk to us in a certain (seemingly very human) way. In short, we are disappointed to discover that God does not speak to us the way that another person would.

How could we not expect this? Because of our own human experiences as parents, children, coworkers, bosses, students, and teachers, we’ve naturally come to expect that God’s voice would be like everyone else’s in our lives In so doing, though, we place unspoken expectations upon God the he is supposed to act like a human. But God doesn’t always speak the same way a human does. God is God. We are human.¹ In these moments of disappointment when God is quiet or silent or seemingly unresponsive, it’s critical not to lose our hope in prayer. Instead, we must reframe our life of prayer with better expectations. As Christian psychologist David Benner wisely put it, “If you have been doubting the efficacy of prayer as a way to get God's attention and favor, don’t abandon prayer. But be prepared to adjust your understanding of it.” Too often we abandon prayer not because prayer doesn’t work. Rather, we abandon prayer because we’ve done violence to it with our false and hallow expectations. 

The good news remains that feeling unheard is not a sign of unanswered prayer. In fact, prayer is often the bearing of one’s soul before God despite what I like to call the sheer terror of perceived silence. But God’s silence is anything but God’s absence. From time to time, I will be interviewed for a podcast or radio program. Many people today use a program called Riverside to record these conversations. This program is an interesting one—it records locally on both the computer of the one interviewing and the one being interviewed. This is a brilliant invention as it means that even if the connection is lost or the video freezes, it continues to record on the local computer. Time and again I’ve been told by my interviewer, “Hey, even if it seems like the connection is lost, it isn’t. Just keep talking. It is being recorded.” Every time I do a podcast with Riverside, I am reminded: the sense of disconnection I feel in prayer is not the failure of prayer. Everything is being heard by the Spirit who is within me.

Prayer isn’t valuable because it leaves us with the feeling of being heard. Prayer is life-giving because “the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.” (1 Cor 2.10) And because the Spirit is within us, locally, we can always trust that we are being heard even despite the evidence. This means that even if we do not feel the Father speaking, we can boldly know that the Spirit within us is bearing our prayers to the Father even if it looks like the connection is lost. In Christ, the connection is never lost. 

Prayer also invites us to face our own self-doubt. We face a sense of unease knowing how feeble, imperfect, and fractured our own prayer life is before God. As if prayer only worked because of the strength of the pray-er.² No. Prayer is powerful because of the one listening. Not the one uttering their broken requests. “Perhaps we doubt the sincerity of our prayer and the worth of our request,” Karl Barth once wrote, “But one thing is beyond doubt: it is the answer that God gives. Our prayers are weak and poor. Nevertheless, what matters is not that our prayers be forceful, but that God listens to them. That is why we pray.”³ 

The gift of prayer, of course, is that it helps us resist the cantankerous impulse toward spiritual performance. This is why we have the Psalms to help us. In Evangelical culture where every prayer has to be extemporaneously made up on the spot, thank God we have some ready-made prayers that we don’t have to re-write. No doubt, in his own moment of suffering, Christ opts not to speak his own words. He speaks the words of Psalm 22 that he would have likely learned as a child from his mother. For many Christians who feel as though they have exhausted their own hearts before God, learning to pray the prayers of the saints who have gone before provides a trellis for new intimacy before God. 

And, lastly, we can be moved to doubt because our prayers are often tied to our temptation. One brilliant theologian, Thomas von Hagel, writes intimately about how prayer and temptation often have a deeper relationship than we might assume:

Each works in conjunction with the other. Prayer leads to meditation, which results in temptation. Whether you concentrate on your prayers or repeat them, their words and ideas affect you sooner or later. (And for many of us it is later.) And once these words and ideas get “into” you, they will not sit still, turning over in your mind, accusing your flesh, comforting your heart. Prayer and meditation the evil one cannot tolerate. He tempts you to disobey the commands connected to prayer and doubt the promises. He tempts you to forgo your meditations as silly ruminations, if not irrational. Over and again, temptation sends you back to prayer, which leads to meditation, which results in temptation, until you finally look to the Savior who delivers you from the clutches of the tempter, which then sends you back to prayer and on it goes.⁴

Von Hagel, it seems, understood that it is that which is birthed in prayer that often gives way to our greatest temptations. Certainly, this could be the simplest way to look at how Jesus would have experienced his own prayer life. Jesus is recorded as hearing the voice of the Father only two times in the gospels. On both occasions—one at his baptism and the other at the transfiguration—Jesus hears the same thing: “this is my son whom I love with whom I am well pleased.” (Matt. 3.17 and 17.5) Jesus is never again recorded as hearing the voice of the Father in the gospels. 

Yet, when Jesus prays to the Father on the cross—in his most painful and excruciating moment—he hears nothing but the sheer silence and the mocking words of those beside and below. Can you imagine this? Imagine having heard the Father’s voice two times when things were good and well. But nothing at the moment you are most in need. What would Jesus have thought at that moment? 

I can only imagine that this would have been the moment of greatest temptation. That the Father has left. That no one will come for you. That all hope is lost. Had I been on the cross, I would have likely believed the encounter with the voice of the Father earlier on was just the silly excitement of my younger years. I’d have written off what I’d heard before.

But Jesus does not give in to such temptation. Because what he’d received from the Father earlier in his life was enough to get him through this moment. The problem for many people in their prayer life is the distant memory of God’s radical provision and care in the past. Which is rational: when one has seen God part the Red Sea, it’s very difficult to understand why he’d have you walk in the desert for forty years. There is a price tag that comes with experiencing a real, intimate relationship with Christ in prayer. Namely, that there will be times when he is also silent. And it is in those moments, I suspect, we are most likely to doubt. 

Which is why reading the writings of people like Nouwen is so eye-opening and transformative. Nouwen refused to use prayer as a means to get something from God. He entered prayer to find God himself—even if it meant embracing the silence. Years ago, a Japanese psychologist by the name of Kenjiro Uemuro wrote a fascinating academic article about the Japanese concept of Amae. Amae is, Uemuro defines it, the feeling every human being has to desire to return once again to their mothers arms to be cared for, to be dependent, and to be passively loved for who one is. In writing about Amae, Uemuro turns to the writings of Nouwen. As he read, he came to discern why Nouwen’s writings were as powerful as they were. Nouwen wrote as someone who lived the latter part of his life with a deep desire for Amae—just in his relationship with God. And how all those later writings (including The Inner Life of Love) are the writer’s deep desire to be found in Christ as his caregiver.⁵ This is the essence of all prayer, isn’t it? To return to God as our original caretaker.

Photo by abdallaa alebrahim on Unsplash

This is why the task of embracing the difficulties of prayer is part of the journey of prayer itself. If we are struggling with prayer, then we are praying. When I teach my New Testament class, I introduce my students to the fact that the New Testament writers had a tricky job in writing their texts—they did not have much money, very little time, and an urgency to get word out quickly. They wrote in a style called scripta continua—meaning ‘continual script.’ The earliest Christian writings that we now know as the gospels, epistles, and apocalypse actually had no spaces in them so as to save space, time, and money. 

This makes interpretation of these texts so difficult. To illustrate this, I write on the board up-front the following phrase:

Godisnowhere

I then ask them to read it out loud for themselves. There are always two interpretations. They either see it say “God is nowhere.” Or, they see “God is now here.” They both see the same thing. But the difference of their interpretations is almost always the projection of their presuppositions that they bring to the exercise. Are we inclined to believe that it means there is a God who is present. Or, are we inclined to believe that there is no God and we are all alone in a cold, distant universe. 

How we interpret the difficulty of prayer is everything. Not if we experience difficulty in prayer. But what how we interpret these difficulties. We will all face doubt in our intimacy with God. This is inevitable. The question will be how we are inclines to make sense of it. Will we look at difficulty in our prayer life as a sign that God is nowhere to be found and we are hopelessly alone? Or, do we interpret it as God’s way of shaping us into the kinds of people who can handle difficulty in relationship with God? 

The difference between the two is: what are we inclined to trust? 

Now in my forties, I’m inclined to believe that my struggle to pray is a sign that God is drawing me to himself. My friend Andrew Ray Williams—whose book Reconstructing Prayer I had the privilege to write a foreword for—talks about what he calls ‘faithful doubt.’⁶ That is it. Prayer is faithful doubt. What a delightful way to describe what we all face as we come toe-to-toe with the sheer silence of God’s presence. Indeed, it is in prayer where we not only come to terms with how our hearts are prone to doubt. It is also that place where we come to terms with a God who is prone to love and welcome, despite our furious misgivings and frustrating angst. 

And how doubt can be a means by which we learn to love the living God back.

1. This is why, I would contend, the incarnation of Jesus is so important. God knew we could not speak to him on God’s terms. And so, like any good parent, God comes to our human level in order to draw us to himself.

2. I love how Mark Thibodeaux always uses the term ‘pray-er’ as a way of describing the one who prays in his Mark Thibodeaux, Armchair Mystic: Easing Into Contemplative Prayer (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001).

3. Karl Barth, Prayer, 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. Don Sailers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 13.

4. von Hagel, Thomas, “Prayer, Meditation, Temptation Prepare the Teacher,” Logia 15 (2006): 54. Thanks to my friend Andy Mahoney for turning me on to von Hagel’s brilliant (and dense) work.

5. Kenjiro Uemura, “The Japanese Concept of Amae: New Light on Henri Nouwen’s Experience of Depression,” Pastoral Psychology 70, no. 4 (2021): 419–39.

6. Andrew Ray Williams, Reconstructing Prayer: Beyond Deconstructing Your Faith (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023), 8.