Already Answered
ALREADY ANSWERED — THE BLOG SERIES
The questions keeping you up at night were asked three thousand years ago. They were answered, too.
Short essays that take a question people are actually asking and follow it back to the Wisdom Book that already answered it. Subscribe to get each new post as it goes up.
I Prayed and Nothing Happened
The most common wound in the life of faith is the prayer that goes up and gets nothing back. The Psalms already knew about it, and did not look away.
Carol prayed for her mother every night for the better part of four years. Nothing dramatic. At the start she prayed for healing, and when it became clear that was not coming, she prayed smaller. For a good afternoon. For her mother to know her face. For one more conversation that went somewhere. By the end she prayed on the drive to the memory care unit, because she had learned that her mother would ask who she was, politely, the way you ask a stranger, and Carol wanted to be done crying before she walked in.
None of it changed anything. Her mother declined exactly the way the doctors said she would, on exactly their timeline, as if the prayers were not part of the equation at all. Carol did not lose her temper at God. It was quieter than that. Somewhere in the third year she noticed she had stopped expecting an answer, and somewhere after that she noticed she had stopped expecting anyone to be listening. The prayers still went up. They just went up the way a letter goes into a box you have started to suspect is not collected.
If you have prayed like that, you know it is not rare. It might be the most common wound in the life of faith. Some of you prayed for a marriage that ended anyway. Some for a child who is still not safe. Some prayed for years to be free of something in yourselves that never lifted. And some of you did not lose your faith here. You found it here, and you walked in still carrying something that happened long before, and no one warned you that faith would not make it stop hurting.
I am not going to explain the silence to you. I do not know why some prayers are answered and some are met with nothing, and the people who say they do know have always made me trust them less, not more. I want to show you something else. I want to show you that the book already knew about the silence, and did not look away from it, and did not apologize for it either.
Most people think the Psalms are gentle. Green pastures, still waters, the Lord is my shepherd. That is one psalm. There are a hundred and forty-nine more, and a great many of them are not gentle at all. Close to a third are what scholars call laments, and a lament is not a polite prayer. It is a complaint. It is a person turning to God and saying, where are you, this is not right, how long are you going to let this stand. The book is full of people arguing with God, accusing him, demanding he wake up and do something.
And then there is Psalm 88. It is a lament, one of the hundred and fifty Psalms, and it is widely considered the bleakest passage in the whole Bible. It is the prayer of someone who has been sick and suffering since they were young, who feels abandoned by God and deserted by everyone they had. The man praying it accuses God directly, of turning away from him, of going silent at the exact moment he needed an answer. He asks whether the dead can praise God, which is not a poetic flourish, it is a man saying he is running out of time. And then Psalm 88 does the thing almost no other prayer in the book does. It refuses to turn. There is no sunrise in the last line, no resolution, no vow of trust to make the reader comfortable. It begins in the dark and it stays there. Its final words are “my only friend is darkness.” There is a prayer in the Bible that ends in the dark, and nobody softened it, and it was left there on purpose.
Think about what that means. The people who decided what would be holy and read aloud in every generation looked at a prayer with no happy ending and said, this one stays. They made sure that when someone hit the bottom and could not pray, there would be one prayer in the book that did not lie to them, did not rush them, and sat down in the dark beside them and stayed.
That is the part I missed for most of my life. I thought faith meant getting to the hopeful line. I thought if I could not arrive at the place where the psalm turns toward trust, I was doing it wrong. My own silence was quieter than Carol’s four years, and cost me nothing like what they cost her, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I knew the ceiling. I knew the prayer that goes up and stops. And no one had ever told me that the ceiling is in the Bible too, that the silence I had taken for God’s absence was a silence the Psalms had already prayed, out loud, without flinching, without tidying it at the end.
Lament is not the loss of faith. It is faith that refuses to lie.
And notice what the psalm never does. It does not tell the sufferer to count their blessings, to get some perspective, to remember that other people have it worse. It lets the man stay exactly where he is, in the dark, and it calls that prayer. He never gets his answer. He never feels better. God puts his words in the holy book anyway, unedited.
And there is one more thing the Church did with this prayer, which I did not know until late. It hands Psalm 88 to Christ. The Church prays it in his voice on the day his body lay in the tomb and heaven was silent. The darkest prayer in the book is the prayer God himself prayed from inside the silence. Not because the dark is good, but because he has been all the way down in it.
One wound has to be named on its own, because it is not like the others. Some of you were not failed by silence. You were failed by the Church itself, by a man who was trusted and should never have been, or by the men above him who knew and moved him and said nothing. That is not an unanswered prayer. It is betrayal by the one institution that claimed to speak for God, in the place that was supposed to be safe, and it is its own kind of darkness, deeper than the rest. I will not file it in a list as if it were one item among many. And if it is yours, hear this part: the God of these books was handed over by the religious authorities of his own day, betrayed by the people who held the keys to the temple. He is not above your wound. He is inside it. You may be nearer the center of this faith than anyone who never had reason to ask.
These books were never written for small troubles. They were built for the worst that can happen to a person, and they do not look away from it. I cannot tell you when the silence ends. Psalm 88 does not tell you either, and that is the most honest thing about it. What it tells you instead is that the dark is not a sign you prayed wrong. It is a place the book has been before you.
If you love someone who is praying into silence right now, you already know there is nothing you can say that fixes it. So do not try. Do not tell them to keep the faith. If you send them anything, send them this, and let it sit there without a lecture attached. Sometimes the kindest thing is to not be one more person insisting it will all make sense eventually.
Already answered. In the dark, long before any of us, by someone who refused to pretend.
The question is whether you are willing to pray it.
Next post, the last in this series: the person standing at the door, closer than they have been in years, not sure they want to walk through it. What all seven Wisdom Books say to the one who is almost ready.
The Psalms are one of the seven Wisdom Books at the heart of The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
Carol is a figure, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.