Seminary forces you to confront your easy assumptions of faith, and I was especially challenged by the writings of women who were questioning the all-male language for God (He, Him, Father, King etc.) and pointing out its negative impact on women’s religious experience. Was that it? I didn’t know.

And then I read some of the great medieval mystics and their anguished reflections on the “long, dark night of the soul.” In the writings of St. John of the Cross and several others, I was astonished to find an exact description of my own experience that where there had been a warm relationship in prayer, now it seemed a big, steel door had slammed shut (my metaphor) and there was only a cold silence. It helped to know I was not alone in this experience, but it was no cure. The silence stayed.

Finally, I had to tell the minister who was to perform my ordination service. It seemed dishonest to go forward with ordination when my prayer life was in shambles. He told me that you have to be brave to have faith, and if nothingness were the relationship for now, then I had to have the courage to stay with the nothingness until perhaps there was something. He also told me that many who are church members feel the nothingness most or even all of the time and they too are ashamed to admit it. He said that my staying with the truth of my experience would make me a better pastor. Perhaps it has. I know it has kept me truthful about the fact that faith formation is not for sissies (to borrow a phrase from Bette Davis).

Ten years later on an ordinary day, I was sitting in a park attempting once again to pray and suddenly I was flooded with the presence of God in such an immediate way that it was practically painful. There are no words adequate to this experience—and I have never again felt such intensity in the presence of God. But the steel door opened; not all the way, but where there was nothing now there was something again.

What changed for me through this formative religious experience, an experience that continues, is that I cannot pray with words. I can only wait in silence and humbly hope for presence.