When There Is Nothing Left to Ask

The Prayer That Remains When Hope Has Grown Tired

“Lord Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to ask anymore.”

There comes a point in the spiritual life when prayer can no longer be sustained by the questions that once gave it urgency.

For years perhaps we have prayed:

Show me the way.

Tell me what You desire.

Open the door.

Make clear what I should do.

Give me strength to follow.

And we meant these prayers.

We waited.

We discerned.

We tried to remain faithful. We sought counsel. We endured uncertainty. We accepted delays. We told ourselves that God’s time was not our time and that the hiddenness of Providence did not mean its absence.

But sometimes the years pass and the road does not become clearer.

One door closes.

Another remains half-open but cannot be entered.

Things once thought permanent disappear.

Identities by which we understood ourselves become less certain.

Institutions from which we expected guidance prove unable to give it.

Even desires that once burned strongly begin to grow quiet.

Eventually the heart may reach a place more desolate than uncertainty.

It becomes tired of asking.

And then a prayer arises that hardly sounds like prayer at all:

Lord Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to ask anymore.

Beyond Waiting

It would be easy to romanticize this.

We might call it surrender.

Detachment.

Holy indifference.

Waiting upon God.

But sometimes it is none of these things.

Sometimes a person is simply tired.

There is a kind of weariness that reaches deeper than the body. It comes when the soul has carried unanswered questions for so long that even hope begins to feel like another burden it is expected to carry.

This is not necessarily despair.

Nor is it peaceful resignation.

The person has not turned away from God.

He simply no longer knows what to say to Him.

The Desert Fathers knew that there are states of the heart in which the horizon seems to disappear. They did not always answer such moments with explanations. Sometimes their counsel was startlingly small.

Stay in the cell.

Do not run.

Do not construct another life in your imagination.

Do not believe every thought that comes with the darkness.

Call upon God.

Remain until the hour passes.

Yet even the word remain can become burdensome when it begins to sound like another spiritual accomplishment.

There are moments when one does not feel that one is heroically remaining.

One is simply still there.

Perhaps that is enough.

When Hope Becomes Another Labor

We often speak of hope as though it were an emotion we must continually generate.

The Christian should be hopeful.

The Christian should trust.

The Christian should believe that God has a plan.

All of this can be true and yet become cruel when spoken too easily to someone who has become profoundly weary.

Christian hope is not confidence that tomorrow will explain today.

It is not certainty that every unresolved circumstance will eventually be resolved in a manner we can recognize as beautiful.

It is not the conviction that every closed door conceals a better one.

Sometimes no door appears.

Christian hope is finally much poorer than optimism.

It is Christ.

And there may come a time when even saying I trust You feels beyond us.

Then perhaps we need not say it.

Perhaps we can simply say His Name.

The Prayer Beneath Prayer

St. Isaac the Syrian understood prayer as something that eventually passes beyond the multiplication of words.

At first we bring God everything.

Our needs.

Our fears.

Our desires.

Our plans.

Our repentance.

Our questions.

Our longing for those we love.

This is good. Christ Himself teaches us to ask.

But prayer is gradually drawing us somewhere deeper than asking.

It is drawing us toward communion.

And sometimes life itself accomplishes a terrible simplification.

The questions remain, but we no longer possess the strength to carry them into prayer one by one.

What should I do?

Where should I go?

What will become of me?

Why has this happened?

What is my vocation now?

When will something change?

What am I supposed to hope for?

Eventually they collapse into a single confession:

I don’t know.

And strangely, this may be one of the most truthful things we ever say before God.

I Don’t Know

The ego hates these words.

It wants a narrative.

It wants to understand what season of life this is.

It wants to know whether something is ending or beginning.

It wants to identify the lesson.

It wants to turn suffering into meaning as quickly as possible.

Even spiritually, we can become impatient to interpret ourselves.

God is stripping me.

God is preparing me.

God is leading me into hiddenness.

God is closing one chapter and opening another.

Perhaps.

But perhaps we do not know.

The Fathers teach us a much more severe humility.

Do not claim knowledge God has not given.

There are seasons in which the most faithful interpretation of one’s life may simply be:

I do not understand what God is doing.

That is not unbelief.

It is poverty.

When the Future Becomes Too Heavy

Much of our suffering comes not from the present moment but from carrying an imagined future.

We try to live tomorrow before it arrives.

We rehearse possibilities.

We construct outcomes.

We anticipate losses.

We solve conversations that have never occurred.

We try to determine where we will live, what we will become, what will remain, what will disappear, who will be there, and whether the life ahead will still possess meaning.

The future becomes another possession we are desperately trying to secure.

The desert takes this away.

The manna cannot be stored.

Grace is given for today.

This can sound beautiful until one actually has to live it.

There is nothing sentimental about having enough light for only the next step.

We want a road.

God sometimes gives a lamp.

And sometimes the lamp seems to illuminate almost nothing beyond the place where we are standing.

The Poverty of the Name

Perhaps this is why the Jesus Prayer becomes different after many years.

At first:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

There are words.

Meaning.

Petition.

Repentance.

But beneath the words there is something even simpler.

Jesus.

The Name itself.

When the mind no longer knows what to ask, the Name does not require an explanation.

When the future cannot be imagined, the Name remains.

When hope cannot be felt, the Name remains.

When prayer seems empty, the Name remains.

When a person no longer understands who he is becoming, the Name remains.

We do not invoke the Name because it magically removes uncertainty.

We invoke the Name because He is there.

The prayer has ceased trying to obtain an answer and has become a way of refusing to leave the Presence.

Or perhaps even that says too much.

Sometimes we are not consciously refusing anything.

We simply whisper:

Jesus.

And discover afterward that we had not left.

The God Who Does Not Demand an Explanation

There is tremendous mercy in realizing that God does not require us to understand our lives before giving them to Him.

We can come confused.

Disappointed.

Angry.

Exhausted.

Without enthusiasm.

Without plans.

Without spiritual insight.

Without even the desire to discern what comes next.

We can come without an answer to the question:

What do you want?

Perhaps we no longer know.

The prayer can then become:

Lord Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to ask anymore.

Not:

Show me immediately.

Not:

Make this suffering meaningful.

Not:

Restore what has been lost.

Not even:

Give me hope.

Just:

I don’t know what to ask anymore.

And then silence.

There may be more faith in that silence than we realize.

For beneath the exhaustion there remains one extraordinary fact:

the words are still being spoken to Someone.

Empty Hands

Perhaps this is one of the final lessons of the desert.

We begin the spiritual life carrying many things toward God.

Our vocation.

Our virtues.

Our sacrifices.

Our plans.

Our understanding of ourselves.

Our hopes for holiness.

Even our idea of what fidelity should look like.

Slowly the hands are emptied.

Sometimes willingly.

Sometimes painfully.

Sometimes through circumstances we would never have chosen.

Until eventually we discover that we have almost nothing left with which to present ourselves before God.

And perhaps we thought that spiritual maturity would mean arriving before Him carrying a life that finally made sense.

Instead we arrive empty-handed.

This is frightening.

But the Gospel has always told us that the Kingdom belongs to the poor.

Perhaps poverty of spirit eventually includes even this:

not knowing what to ask of God anymore.

Then prayer becomes almost unbearably simple.

No strategy.

No interpretation.

No attempt to force hope.

No demand that tomorrow explain today.

Only the Name.

Only the Presence.

Only Christ.

And perhaps, when everything else has grown tired, this is what remains:

Lord Jesus Christ,

I don’t know what to ask anymore.

Silence.

But I am still speaking to You.

And for tonight,

perhaps that is enough.