NOTHING NEED BE SAID

Father Ron Rolheiser, an on-line mentor whom I frequently cite, tells the story of a woman at one of his workshops who shared a story about her six-year-old son. She had taught him to pray and to kneel beside his bed each night and say a number of the prayers she had taught him, ending with “Bless mommy, daddy, grandma and grandpa.” He did so every night.

Then one night shortly after he started first grade, when it came time to kneel down beside his bed to pray, he simply crawled into bed and got under the covers. Shocked, his mother asked him, “What’s the matter? Don’t you pray anymore?” Calmly he replied, “No, I don’t pray anymore. The sister teaching us at school said that we are not supposed to pray. She said that we were supposed to talk to God and tonight I am tired and have nothing to say.”

Prayer certainly is to be about our conversations with God even if that conversation always seems to be one-way: we do all the talking and we trust that God does all the listening; and we hope that after God listens, God will respond in the manner we want God to respond. God often does, but often God does not. Yet even then we have made our concerns known to God. That’s what matters.

Then, too, like the little boy in the story there have been times when we have been so tired that it was an effort simply to crawl into bed and that any thought of prayer, any effort to converse with God, was simply and impossibility. We immediately dropped off to sleep even though there were some serious issues we wanted to lay before God in prayer. Had we not been so tired, so exhausted from the trials and tribulations of the day just passed, we would have. But we were powerless to say anything, so tired were we.

Yet we know, at least subconsciously, that God already knows what is on our mind and in our hearts. Even when we are wide awake and in full contact with our senses, knowing full well what we are about to take it to the Lord in prayer, God already has a good clue about what is about to come out of our mouth. God knows us better than we know ourselves, much, much better.

That does not mean that we need not pray. That does not mean that we have no need to have a conversation with God even though we are the only one who will be doing the talking. No matter how well we know another, in marriage, for instance, even when we can finish the other person’s sentence and that person can finish ours, we still need to be in conversation.

So it is in our relationship with God. Nothing needs to be said between our God and us, but say it we must if we can, if we are awake enough to speak; and hear it God must even if God knows what is about to come forth from our lips, even if God can finish our sentences. Yes, formulated, memorized, rote prayers are fine. They often say exactly what we want to say. But conversations, even one-sided, are vital and better even if nothing need be said.