Screaming at God

'Sunrise' J.M.W Turner (1845)

The White Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass, screams for no apparent reason. When Alice asks her why she is screaming she says that she is about to prick her finger. This does indeed happen, a few seconds later, at which point she falls silent. When asked the reason for this inversion of the logical sequence of events, she replies that she has already screamed, before she pricked her finger, so why bother screaming now? I think this is a fairly good representation of the attitude many of us take to prayer, even in times of national crisis. Why bother praying, or perhaps ‘screaming’, at God now? We have done our praying, or screaming, and the bombs are being dropped, for better or for worse.

Whatever perspective you are viewing the outcome of Wednesday’s parliamentary vote on whether we should get militarily involved in the Syrian conflict, you could be forgiven for thinking that from here on it’s downhill all the way, whichever side of the argument you favoured, so why bother with prayer? But I do not think that prayer works like that. For one thing, it involves starting from where you really are, rather than where you think you ought to be, with regard to God and what you feel about the world and the Syrian crisis, or about your own life.

In all of these contexts, prayer can certainly involve screaming at God. St. Theresa of Avila, a person of great holiness, was known for her rants. On one occasion the wheel of the vehicle she was travelling in came off and lodged in the mud, upturning the vehicle and ejecting all its passengers. She told God, quite forcefully, that it was not surprising that he had so few friends if this was the way he treated them.  It’s fine to scream at God, but it’s better if we can simply hold the person or the situation in the deep inner space where our existence is ‘grounded’, where it is held firm but not mired down.

We cannot hold all the upheavals going on in our world in our rational minds for very long without putting our own mental health at risk, which is not what God would have us do, or what prayer is about. So we have to do the holding in a different way, using other methods for processing the world’s trauma.

Such methods could involve placing all the events of the past few weeks within the larger moment. The larger moment is time itself, understood any way you like, but understood as that dimension which embraces the past, the present and the future, in Love’s eternal regard.

Holding the moment in the larger moment is like a very simplified version of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen. We breath in the darkness that surrounds us in the present moment and we breath out the light, so becoming a part of that light. The light is life, so when we do this, we are more fully alive. Our minds become clear and steady, more pure, in Buddhist terms.

Christian prayer begins with being present to the moment, breathing it in as we face into the turmoil in the Middle East, what the bible describes as the ‘roaring of the nations’. In prayer, we face into the evil embodied in Isis, the confusion and doubt about what is best to do next, and the moral dilemmas facing world leaders and our own politicians, dilemmas which we must face as a nation, in solidarity with them, irrespective of our political affiliations.

All this darkness comes to us as a kind of scream from outside. If being present to the darkness is not to do us psychological harm, we must encounter it in the silence which is already within us in the form of Christ who waits for us to yield to the grace which he offers. 

The silence is our inner sanctuary. It needs to be cared for and guarded. The darkness will yield to the grace which comes out of silence if we are prepared to spend time in our inner sanctuary, constantly returning to it as our default position. When we do this, and it becomes our way of life, we can begin to breath out the light which comes from the inexhaustible reserve of God’s love for his world and which the darkness will never consume.