The Prayer of Futility

by Fr. Humbert Van Zeller, O.S.B.

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The great complaint with most people about their prayer is that they never feel they're getting anywhere. But of course it would be a very bad sign if they did. A lot of the trouble about prayer would disappear if we only realized— really realized, and not just supposed that it was so—that we go to pray not because we love prayer but because we love God. Not in order to master distractions or perfect a system or because we have said we would go on with the thing, but simply in order to please God. Once granted that God's view of our prayer is the only one that is at all worth taking into account, it can't much matter what our own view of it is. In fact the less view we have of it—and for view we can substitute the word "feeling"—the better. This is what St. John of the Cross is talking about when he says that darkness in prayer is better than light. Better in the sense of being not only safer for us but making for a purer prayer in itself. This is a significant claim to make.

"Oh, I know all about that," you will say, "but it's no use telling me that God's way of judging prayer is so different from my way of judging it that what are distractions to me are praises to Him. Distractions and praises are not only different things altogether, they are completely opposite things. Your theory doesn't make sense." Excuse me, it does. In the first place the opposite to a praise is not a distraction but an insult—and ordinary distractions are certainly not that. In the next place we must remember that God's scale of values, His sphere of operation, His terms, even, are quite different from ours. What is light to Him is so luminous that to our materially focusing eyes it appears as darkness. (This is not simply my idea: it is St. John of the Cross' and, before him, Dionysius the Areopagite's.) If we can't even look at the sun without seeing black spots everywhere, it is hardly likely that we shall see very much of what we are looking at when we are trying to train our gaze upon Light Itself.

God knows the limitations which He has imposed upon man and makes allowances: we think we can see ourselves as God sees us and make difficulties. There is only one test of our prayer: are we wanting God? Do we want Him so much that we are prepared to go on looking for Him in our prayer in spite of apparently never getting any nearer to Him? Upon the answer to this enquiry depends the whole business of our success or failure in prayer. Success and failure to be judged in God's terms, not ours.

The above may be easier to follow if we change the approach. Take the Book of Job. Here we are granted an intimate glimpse into the ways of God, the ways of the devil, the ways of a certain holy man. First of all the devil is briefed, by God's permission, for an attack upon the man Job. Next the attack takes place. Then Satan returns and presents his report. At first sight it looks a good report, but by the time we have finished the Book of Job we realize that the report can be pulled to pieces and that the attack must have been a complete failure. The same sort of thing is presumably still going on: the devil tempting, God permitting, man resisting as best he can. There is imperfection in the fight put up against temptation, and sometimes it seems to the weary frightened soul that there is nothing left of its resolve, but the struggle still goes on and in the topmost pinnacle of the will there is still the refusal to be stampeded into evil. Our prayers, always by God's permission because He knows what is best for us, are for ever being invaded by dryness and distraction. The devil's reports are constantly coming in before the throne of God. There is the same misrepresentation. But though we may be deceived, God is not deceived. Pick out any day in our prayer life and consider the kind of account which Satan might present at the judgement seat of God. It shouldn't be a record of our resisting effort on a good day when perhaps we have been in form, but simply a frank statement of what has been going on when our prayer has run true to normal—when, in other words, it has been that boring blank, punctuated occasionally by the arrival of not very memorable diversions.

"See this dilapidated prayer," says the devil, "and tell me, Lord, whether You don't think it has been a waste of time. Those yawns, for instance, and those furtive glances at the watch—they must certainly score heavily in my favour. And what about that lengthy digression on the subject of his health? Then there was that argument which would have been so convincing if it had in fact taken place instead of being a fanned up piece of self justification existing only in the mind. And those plans for August. Followed by at least ten minutes when nothing seems to have gone on at all. Surely, Lord, You got very little out of that prayer to-day— especially if You take into consideration those memories and imaginations which I suggested to his muddy mind; memories which would be unsuitable anywhere but which are especially so at prayer. Even the attempts at returning to Your presence, Lord, can be counted as winning points to me: they were so half-hearted and infrequent. Add to the total that confessedly bored attitude of mind in which the whole thing was conducted and You will admit that I have won hands down."

So much for the devil's report. First of all there is nothing to show that our prayers are as boring to God as they feel to us. Moreover, even granted that in the given prayer there was nothing substantial which could be listed on the credit side (and there usually is something, though not always something you could put your finger on afterwards) it would surely be reasonable to think of God as countering Satan with the all-important question: "But whom was he doing it for?" That's the point. It would be in keeping with the spirit of the Book of Job to consider the Lord pursuing Satan relentlessly. "It's all very well for you to cite the distractions in My friend's prayer"—so we would have the Lord defending His own—"but though he may not have made a very good thing of it, at least he has not gone back to bed or picked up a novel. He did, you notice, go on. Discouraged as he is about the result of his effort (unreasonably discouraged in point of fact) he will be at it again, you will find, tomorrow morning. His object all along has been—and still is—to please Me, and though he imagines he isn't doing this, he has no intention of pleasing you. While certainly he isn't, poor man, pleasing himself."

The prayer of futility, then, has this inestimable advantage: it keeps us in our place. (It has its dangers too: particularly dejection and laziness.) It enables us to say with sincerity: "I am nothing. I can do nothing. I deserve nothing but kicks and crosses. At the same time nothing in the world will induce me to give it up." Such is the mind of the man in prayer. A fixed refusal to be put off by failure: a willingness to forego the taste of success. The true soul of prayer strives after God alone. Not after satisfaction, not after recollection (for itself's sake), not even after sanctity (regarded as a state and not as a means of loving God), but simply after God Himself. And inevitably God is the reward of such a striving . . . but God expressing Himself more in His Absence than in His Presence. "You wouldn't be looking for Me," as He reassured Pascal, "if you hadn't already found Me."

From We Die Standing Up (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949).

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