How to pray when it’s just not working for you

We end up banging our spiritual heads against the wall many times over the course of a life. The cause can be many things, including growth and progress! Our hearts and heads expand to meet the infinite that has adopted us, but sometimes that means our old clothes don’t fit. Worse things can happen, too, that knock our spiritual chair out from under us.

Truly, it’s not unusual for spiritual stuff to stop working, and the causes are so many. Sometimes, we’ve imagined for ourselves a god who doesn’t exist, rather than the God underneath reality who expands beyond our concepts. Other times, we’ve accepted someone else’s quite narrow straitjacket of prayer, and the contortions of fitting into it are making our back and soul sore. Violations of trust have a way of wrecking our prayers, and tragedy can sometimes do the same for different reasons. We long for the surety and comfort we felt earlier, but the old spiritual food no longer nourishes us in the same way. Or, perhaps, we have never really understood what all this prayer stuff is supposed to do, and it feels suspiciously like talking to ourselves.

Here is a brief series of suggestions for feeling stuck. We have no encyclopedic flowchart with all the answers, but there are bits of wisdom we can gather from our many Christian forebearers who had the same problems. I hope these nudges prove helpful when you need it.

• No single definition of prayer exists, and this is on purpose. We will understand how our desire connects to the divine Desire in different ways over a lifetime. Don’t be afraid of rethinking what should count as prayer. Prayer is not always verbal, nor is it always silence. It might involve movement or stillness or both. Prayer certainly includes shouting and name-calling—God can take it, if we need to let it out. It also includes the sighs we breathe staring out a window, unsure what to say or do. 

• Prayer is not always sweet—sometimes, it is sad, or asks us to confront our anger—but prayer does tend to move toward reality and away from fantasy. Sometimes, this means we’re avoiding prayer because our reality is hard. It might be time to cut yourself some slack and find some sabbath before you can pray. 

• Everyone seems to think walking through nature counts as prayer, and that can be true, but walking through a city may also become a prayer. Art and beauty can lift our souls, too. Praying with an icon, or with music, or while cooking all count.

• We also live at a moment where choice can paralyze us. In the same way that buying a decent pair of shoes has become harder because we have so many choices, learning about prayer can have the same effect. We can look forever for the perfect pair of shoes, but what we need is something that fits and can help us walk. The same is true in prayer. There are so many methods, and most of them are described in glowing terms by books/podcasts/speakers that need only your $20s to fix your problem! While this is exhausting, sometimes, the only way forward is through. As with shoes, we may have a fit problem, and doing some research and trying things on can help. Start learning with libraries and wise people. Monastic daily offices; practicing the presence of God; centering prayer; lectio divina; bodily prayers like yoga; having a spiritual director—go exploring! The Lord’s Prayer is lovely, but it isn’t the answer to everything when we need to talk or when we have wearied of words. Look for friends of your soul, allies of your place in the great Christian family. They are there, I promise. It’s a big family.

• And when you find a prayer practice outside the tradition that knits your soul closer to God, don’t flinch. Listen to your own heart with Spirit-filled curiosity. Vipassana, yoga, daily prostrations, a spot or altar for burning incense and personal reflection, venerating ancestors—these and more are also present in our Christian tradition (if rather ignored or denigrated by American Protestantism). However, the language of our Christianity can become a burden, sometimes because of our own traumas in spirituality, and hearing something differently from another religious tradition can make a difference. Listen carefully, learn and try it out, and talk to someone wise. You might find that the wise person also spent some time learning from the Sufis, or Laozi, or the Buddha, or the Hassidim, and that it launched them closer to Christ, who is, if we take him at his word, the one through whom all these things came to be.

• We also live among other human beings, and they are not always helpful. Good advice sets us free; bad advice oppresses, haunts. Sometimes, it looks like everyone else is doing great, while we are quite sure that we are doing badly. Other people can be unkind, intentionally or not. The media often prefers the scandalous side of Christian life, and white Christian nationalism is truly awful. We can easily spend too much time caught up in all of these problems, and while they really can be problems, they can also be plain old distractions. We need time both to work on problems, and to be fed, and these times may not always overlap. Attend carefully to notice what’s a distraction—most things, if we hold them by the wrong end, can be a distraction. We might need to set them down, at least some of the time.

• There is a difference in prayer between self-discipline and self-destruction, but seeing the difference within our practice can be a challenge. Ask for help—perhaps through spiritual direction—and consider that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results isn’t discipline—it’s insanity. Healthy discipline looks more like a basketball player at the free-throw line or a musician holding their instrument. Focus, good form, and repetition can lead to a specific success, not a happily-ever-after. Discipline in prayer can cultivate courage or compassion, attention or patience, but it won’t magically solve our issues. We might need more sleep, or food, or friends—and more time spent kneeling won’t directly work on these other spiritual issues.

• And when you can’t take it anymore, don’t take it anymore. In the Episcopal service, we say that God “desires not the death of sinners but rather that they may turn and live.” If what you think of as prayer isn’t working for you, see what it would take for you to turn and live. That may be where God is calling you after all.