“Most of the time when I pray, I feel I’m talking to the walls. I don’t feel anything. How do I change that?”
A college student asked me this question a couple months ago. My first response: Welcome to prayer! Almost everyone who starts this journey will admit it feels like speaking into a void. And I don’t know anyone farther along in the journey who hasn’t endured seasons where they don’t “feel” much of anything at all.
Prayer can be frustrating. We’re fully aware of prayer’s importance in the Christian life, but it’s easy to be disappointed by lackluster results. Maybe you see God answering your prayers, but maybe you don’t. Maybe you feel a sense of God’s closeness at times, but maybe you don’t. Maybe your Bible reading pops with insight that leads you to respond to God with thanksgiving, but maybe it doesn’t.
World of Technique
You can find various tools and techniques that promise to make Paul’s instruction to “pray without ceasing” easier to practice (1 Thess. 5:17). I benefit from some myself: a prayer bench in a corner of my home office for three-times-a-day kneeling; a frankincense candle reminiscent of temple incense rising to God; a prayer book (I alternate between several, including my own Psalms in 30 Days, Life of Jesus in 30 Days, and Letters of Paul in 30 Days); a list of family members, coworkers, and church members with different needs.
Some Christians rely on apps with built-in reminders, on audio prayer experiences, or on prayer structures like ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). Others prioritize prayer in community, interceding with others, reinforcing each other’s requests, passionately pouring out our hearts to God as we lean into the work of prayer.
But the feeling of God’s nearness—that palpable sense of being in the presence of God, where shivers run down your spine; that tingling sensation that rolls across your body; or a less physical but no less profound sense of deep peace that washes over you, similar to a powerful worship service where the space between heaven and earth suddenly gets thin and you taste the blessedness of sensing with spiritual sight the God you love . . . That experience cannot be engineered. It cannot be manufactured. You can’t make it take place, no matter your tools or techniques. Neither can you stop it if God wants to give it to you, and sometimes he shows up when you’re not using tools at all.
Resonance for Life
In The Uncontrollability of the World, German philosopher Hartmut Rosa claims the driving cultural force of modernity is the attempt to make the world controllable. We try to make the world knowable, reachable or accessible, and manageable, so we can then make it useful, press it into service, “make it into an instrument for our own purposes” (17).
Instrumentalizing the world doesn’t make us happy, though, because “it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world” (2). (This is a phenomenon Max Weber described as “disenchantment.”)
Soul-satisfying mystery starts with wonder awakened in the soul by something that cannot be engineered, like the first snowfall of winter, or seeing the beauty of birds in flight, or encountering another person who isn’t predictable, someone not under your control. Rosa names that feeling of awe “resonance.” Something calls out to you. Something echoes in your heart. “Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from the outside,” he writes. It’s like falling asleep. “The harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed” (37).
Rosa’s focus isn’t religious or spiritual experiences, although he does mention the uncontrollability of the God described in Scripture. But his point applies well to spiritual disciplines in the Christian life. We cannot make resonance happen through knowledge of theology, mastery of the Bible, or management of prayer practices. Experiencing God is unpredictable.
Prayer Isn’t Controlling God
The presence of God can feel elusive to us, even when we ask for it, because prayer isn’t magic. We aren’t conjurers. We cannot manufacture a true religious experience. Prayer is an encounter with the living God. The feeling that sometimes results from an encounter with God is uncontrollable because we’re dealing with a personal God, not a force we can harness through incantations.
If every time you prayed you felt something deeply spiritual in your soul, you’d probably pray less, not more. This is counterintuitive, I know, but think about it. If every time you summoned God he manifested his presence in the way you wanted, you’d suspect you’re not summoning God at all. The God of the Bible isn’t a magic genie. He isn’t an idol on the shelf. He isn’t controllable. It’s he who summons us. Even if it were possible to arrive somehow at the pinnacle of prayer, satisfaction would still elude us because there’d no longer be any resonance, no more possibility for growth.
In contrast, in eternity we’ll find God more and more “reachable” as we gaze at his beauty, coming to know him more yet never completely plumbing the depths of his essence. The beatific vision maintains the precise conditions for everlasting resonance. We’ll be simultaneously satiated by God and compelled to know him more—our desires both fulfilled and intensified.
That’s good news for those of us who struggle in prayer, who feel like we’re just “going through the motions,” who wonder if it’s really true we’re pressed up against the thin space between heaven and earth. Spiritual formation sometimes takes place through the powerful experience of God’s presence. But most often it comes through routine and habit, through a type of tediousness, where you may not feel the God whose name you invoke and yet you continue to kneel before him, trusting that when you raise your voice in prayer to the Father above, the Son stands beside you, interceding for you, and the Spirit prays through you.
A simple morning prayer, in your bedroom or at your desk, presses you up against the thin space of another dimension, at the veil between this world and heaven. You’re surrounded by wonders of which you’re unaware. We don’t engineer these wonders. We aren’t in control. We don’t harness the wind for our purposes. The Spirit harnesses us for his.
Maybe that’s why Jesus told us to keep asking, to keep seeking, to keep knocking. You never know which knock will open the door.
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