Prayer factor

There’s a wonderful line in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn where Huck says, “She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work.”

Like Huck, I’m always praying for hooks. Unlike Huck, I actually get them sometimes. Why? Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Something I didn’t do? Was it the arrangement of the stars? Was it someone else’s prayer? What was it?

The hooks come and the hooks go. I just can’t figure out why.

It’s easy to see why people get superstitious. “Last time it worked when I did this . . . or was it like this? Did I begin my prayer with ‘Dear Heavenly Father,’ or was it simply ‘Lord’? Did I have a beard? Had I confessed all my sins? Or was there perhaps some sin outstanding, yet God wanted to show his grace by answering my prayer despite my sinfulness? Or did I simply have enough faith, and too bad for those who don’t?”

On and on it goes.

Prayer is a mystery as bottomless as the deepest ocean. We’re all trying to handle God, trying to get a handle on God. What do I want from him? What does he want from me?

Some say it’s not about the hooks. Don’t pray for hooks. It’s about us, about changing us, moulding us into the image of Christ. It’s a conversation. Rather than giving answers, it illuminates the questions. What are we really asking? What do we really want? Who, in fact, are we?

Well, if that’s the case, it’s like no conversation I’ve ever had. I’m not hearing anything on the other end. I’m a kid talkin’ into a tin can and the words aren’t climbing the string. I want God to talk to me. I want to hear his voice.

A despairing friend once described his experience of prayer as “crying to the brass heavens.”

“There’s no answer,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m on my own. I’m afraid nobody is there.” And yet, he still believed in God. Intensely.

Then I think, maybe prayer is something inexplicable like what John of the Cross tries to explain in Dark Night of the Soul: “When this wisdom of love purges the soul with darkness and predicaments, it is secret because the soul does not know what to say about it. Even after enlightenment, when this wisdom is clearly known, it is still so secret to the soul that it is unable to speak about it or give it names; . . . the soul is unable to find any means, any metaphor, adequate to it or able to signify such a high means of knowing and such delicate spiritual feeling.”

Well.

Maybe I’m asking too much of prayer. And maybe, like Huck, this really isn’t about prayer. It’s about whether to believe in God at all. That’s what Huck is really saying: “If there ain’t no hooks, well, there ain’t no God.”

These are the questions. And it can seem that no answers will come, no matter how much we pray. But this may be the point. Perhaps God simply craves our attentive silence, like C.S. Lewis suggests in Till We Have Faces: “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Pray without ceasing. That’s what the Good Book says. If this is prescriptive, if this is possible, then prayer is something we should be able to do at all times in all places, when we’re eating, driving, shopping. Prayer without ceasing must be a state of being, a way of existing. Prayer is a medium; our medium.

We must live in prayer the way a fish lives in water. And perhaps that watery medium runs clearest in silence, free of the unfiltered silt of our confused wants, frustrated desires, and all the rest of the babble we think we mean.

We swim; we breathe; we live. And that’s when God hooks us.

Faithful Skeptic attends a Mennonite Brethren church and prays without ceasing – most of the time.

This is Faithful Skeptic’s final contribution to Question of faith. The Herald is grateful for his honest musings over the past year. Beginning in January, the column will be open to other voices and new wonderings.