My Soul Waits In Silence

She noticed it properly at a hospital bedside, which is a hard place to notice a thing like that.

Her friend's husband, and she had been asked to pray, and everybody expected her to, because she is the one who does. She has prayed out loud in that circle for twenty years and she is good at it, in the way that means nobody feels performed at.

And she opened her mouth and there was nothing there.

Not a blank in the sense of forgetting. A genuine absence of words. She got through it. She said something. Nobody in that room knew anything was wrong, and she drove home and sat in the drive for a while.

She is fifty-five, and it has been about fourteen months.

She still sits down to pray. Every morning, in the same chair, the way she always has. And she sits there, and nothing comes, and after a while she gets up.

What she believes about that, and this is the thing that has been quietly grinding her down for a year, is that she has stopped praying. Not that her praying has changed. That it has stopped, and that she has been sitting in a chair for fourteen months doing nothing and calling it prayer, and that God has been getting silence from her since the spring before last.

What the psalm calls it

David opens the sixty-second psalm with a description of his own condition, and the phrase he uses is the exact phrase for what you have been calling nothing.

Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation.Psalm 62:1

The Hebrew underneath waiteth carries the sense of silence toward God. Some translations render it exactly that way: my soul is silent toward God. Waiting and silence are not two things in that verse; they are one thing with one name, and the name is what David is doing.

So the state you have been calling the absence of prayer is the state a psalm opens by describing as prayer.

And notice the second half. From him cometh my salvation. The silence is not empty in that verse. It is a silence directed at somebody, from whom something is expected. That is not the same as having nothing to say; it is the posture of a person who is waiting rather than talking.

You are doing something Scripture names, and it named it in the first line of a psalm. That is not me making your fourteen months sound better than they are; Psalm 62:1 puts waiting and silence together as one condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it beside a woman in a chair with nothing coming.

Where the mistake came in

Now let me get at the assumption, because it is the whole injury and it is not yours alone.

You learned that prayer is words. Everybody in your tradition learned that, and it is not a wicked idea; it is just an incomplete one that goes unexamined because prayers that can be heard are the only prayers anybody can observe.

But if words were the prayer, then a person who has lost their words has lost prayer, and that would be true of the dying and the exhausted and the very ill and the grieving, which is to say it would fail exactly the people it is most needed by.

You have been measuring prayer by the only part of it anybody can hear. The written word gives waiting in silence as a soul's posture toward God, and the Holy Spirit is described elsewhere as making intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered, which is an explicit provision for a person with no words.

And let me say the thing about the bedside, because you have carried that afternoon for over a year. You did not fail there. You had nothing and you stayed and you said something anyway, and your friend has no idea and would be horrified to learn you have been punishing yourself since. A woman who had stopped caring would have found a reason not to be at that bed.

You are not sitting in that chair doing nothing, and God has not been receiving silence from you. Scripture puts the silent waiting in the psalm's opening line as the very thing being described, and the Holy Spirit has been in that chair every morning for fourteen months.