One of the most difficult times in our journey is when we come to realize that our prayers aren’t answered, when we conclude that there isn’t a Magical Being who grants our wishes or rescues us, when we are left with our smoldering questions and sometimes left in the dark.
The most peaceful time of the day for me is at night, outside, dimly lit by stars.
(This cartoon first appeared last week on the friendlyatheist blog).
Going through such a transition in your life? Need to talk? I provide transition support. My rates are fair and sliding. If you want to talk, email me to initiate.
My BOOKS.
My ART.
My name is David Hayward, and I am the nakedpastor. I am a graffiti artist on the walls of religion.
Well done!
After the rightful fading of a magic-god, ironically, perhaps another frame could appear in your cartoon after the darkness:
A huge exclamation mark!
I hope you have not lost God completely David.
One of the most enlightening times in our journey is when we come to realize that God really does care for us, and that He does hear and answer all our prayers.
Quite often His answer is ‘no’, or ‘not yet’.
When we pray ‘not my will, but thy will be done’…then His answer will always be ‘yes’.
Not an easy thing to do for us self-obsessed children of a very loving God.
@ Gary:
Have you ever imagined that many of David’s cartoons are addressing believers like you who would ask him questions like that? Have you thought that may you love his stuff when he keeps using language and images you have grown fond of, but when he stretches beyond there, you somehow worry about ‘poor’ David?
If God is all-present, how could David lose him?
@ David:
The Zen Oxherding pictures, which I am sure you know, remind me of your drawing today. Your last picture in today’s post is similar to the 8th in the Oxherding story. And it seems your site offers others a hand to walk together back into a full life after seeing the empty sky.
The thought of unanswered prayer is foreign to me. I suppose that may be because I think of prayer as Presence rather than petitioning.
PRAYER
Prayer is so simple,
It is like quietly opening a door
And slipping into the very presence of God.
There in the stillness
To listen to his voice;
Perhaps to petition,
Or only to listen;
It matters not.
Just to be there
In his Presence
Is Prayer.
Answers to Prayer: Yes, No, Wait
ASK GOD
I asked God for strength, that I might achieve…
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health, that I might do greater things…
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy…
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men…
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need for God.
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life…
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for…
But everything that I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among men, most richly blessed!
–Author Unknown
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Seek the Lord while he may be found;
Call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way
And the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him,
And to our God, for he will freely pardon.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Neither are your ways my ways,”
Declares the Lord.
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:6-9)
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
–Soren Kierkegaard
The Fruit of Silence is Prayer
The Fruit of Prayer is Faith
The Fruit of Faith is Love
The Fruit of Love is Service
The Fruit of Service is Peace
– Mother Teresa
AN INDIAN PRAYER
O’ GREAT SPIRIT,
Whose voice I hear in the winds,
And whose breath gives life to all the world,
hear me! I am small and weak, I need your
strength and wisdom.
LET ME WALK IN BEAUTY, and make my eyes
ever behold the red and purple sunset.
MAKE MY HANDS respect the things you have
made and my ears sharp to hear your voice.
MAKE ME WISE so that I may understand the
things you have taught my people.
LET ME LEARN the lessons you have hidden
in every leaf and rock.
I SEEK STRENGTH, not to be greater than my
brother, but to fight my greatest
enemy—myself.
MAKE ME ALWAYS READY to come to you with
clean hands and straight eyes.
SO WHEN LIFE FADES, as the fading sunset,
my spirit may come to you
without shame.
I believe in a Higher Self today. Christ in me, the hope of glory. Emmanuel…God with us.
It’s altogether one, and yet separate.
It’s responsibility for my limited self, and at the same time I’m more than I know.
The same, yet different.
One of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, wrote beautifully on the silence of God (it’s a tough poem, a conversation between Lucifer and God) Here are my favorite lines:
having no need to speak
You sent Your tongue
splintered into angels.
even i,
with my little piece of it
have said too much.
to ask You to explain
is to deny You.
before the word
You were.
It’s kinda hard to see God when you haven’t found the light within.
It’s kinda hard to find the light within without love.
That is the Good News – you are loved, always have been, always will be.
Accept the love, find your light, leave behind the darkness, spread the light and love, be the light and love.
Things always didn’t go well for Jesus when he walked this earth, either.
One who was truly innocent and good had to endure all the hardships and hate that a pride-soaked world could throw at him…to the point of being staked to wood and left to die.
Jesus told us plainly, “In this world you WILL have trouble. But be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.”
So…we’ve got that going for us…which is nice.
Its like looking for your sunglasses, not finding them, giving up, then finding them on your head!!
“My grace is enough.”
@Sabio,
“Have you ever imagined” that you really know nothing about what I think or feel?
“Have you ever imagined” that having you continually blindly analyze my comments, my thoughts, my feelings, is annoying to the point of offense?
Try.
God is not in the earthquake, wind, and fire. God was found in the sound of silence.
The Ask God prayer is one of my favorites, and credited to a confederate soldier during the Civil War. I, too, misunderstood this art, and thought that the artist had lost hope….not knowing the artist, and this being my first glimpse of his work. I know now that the explanation is that God is in the quiet, and that he is not a genie in a bottle, but wouldn’t have gotten that without the explanation…I’m a little thick, can’t help it, I think God made me that way
Thanks for sharing your faith and work.
I guess you just don’t believe anymore. I’d be lying if I said that I’ve never had a doubt but then there are always those things that happen that defy all the odds. I have seen many men who claim to be followers of God do some very very bad things. I do not believe this is a logical reason to not believe. I have seen men suffer and pray as I have suffered and pray and sometimes it does truly seem like there is no God. At last when it comes down to it and I am breathing my last breath I believe the Spirit of God is there with me. I can not continue to subscribe to your posts. If you ever want to talk to a Christian who believes that God does not want us to give up logical and intellectual thinking and perhaps get my spin on what is true you can always email. My rates are free to anyone who will listen.
I would not be so quick to decide who is a person of faith and who isn’t.
A wise Lutheran pastor once told me that some people have to lose their religion to find their faith.
The Western Church is going through a period very similar to the Reformation. Church historian Phyllis Tickle has a theory that this happens about every 500 years:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8201186130545666528
Many people are leaving the Church and finding God for 3 reasons:
1. Dogmatic absolutism
2. Self-righteous judgmentalism
3. Sectarian triumphalism
The Trinitarian Mystery is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; not God, Church and Country. And the theological virtues are Faith, Hope and Love; not the civic virtues of the Protestant work ethic.
The worst thing that can happen to a transformative spiritual tradition is to become a civil religion.
An Adequate Faith
“If I, as a Christian, believe that my first duty is to love and respect my fellow in his personal frailty and perplexity, in his own unique hazard and need for trust, then I think that the refusal to let him alone, to entrust him to God and his conscience, and the insistence on rejecting them as persons until they agree with me, is simply a sign that my own faith is inadequate.
My own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound to search the existential depths of faith in its silences, its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In these depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything. It is a kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt, when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division between believer and unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others are all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an unbeliever more or less.”
~ From “Apologies to an Unbeliever” by Thomas Merton
The Law of Allowing
“I am that which I am.
While I am that which I am,
I allow others to be that which they are.”
The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings–by which man becomes one with God.
….The heights that can be reached by metaphysical speculation introduce a man into a realm of pure and subtle pleasure that offers the most nearly permanent delights you can find in the natural order. When you go one step higher, and base your speculations on premises that are revealed, the pleasure gets deeper and more perfect still. Yet even though the subject matter may be the mysteries of the Christian faith, the manner of contemplating them, speculative and impersonal, may still not transcend the natural plane, at least as far as practical consequences go.
–Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
Yes…”at night, outside, dimly lit by stars” is when I’m in awe. Thanks again David.
Doug
Fabulous.
For me, I see the darkness swallowing up the speaker’s presumptions. They could be anything. Reading the comments, I already see a number of readers sharing their ideas as David has shared his own. It just works.
I like how there is no answer–no outcome–in that final panel. Who knows what happened? The speaker could be out like the author on a dark night, but why? The speaker could just as easily be anywhere else cloaked in darkness and that’s where I find the beauty of it.
Carol thank you for your comments. They were great reading! Do you have a blog?
I believe my words have been grossly misunderstood as I have also perhaps misunderstood this cartoon. I am both very much a liberal and a Christian. I am not the judge of anyones faith. There are many factors that shape each indivduals beliefs and I believe that God judges more by what is in ones heart and not dogma…All I’m saying is that I don’t care to continue to receive posts that would suggest that there is no God or that God does not hear our prayers. Also, the idea that one would offer ‘transition support’ for a fee strikes me as peculiar as this seems to imply the very type of snobery and dogma that is so criticized.
Woody writes:
“All I’m saying is that I don’t care to continue to receive posts that would suggest that there is no God or that God does not hear our prayers. Also, the idea that one would offer ‘transition support’ for a fee strikes me as peculiar as this seems to imply the very type of snobery and dogma that is so criticized.”
My impression is that what is being “doubted” is our understanding of the Mysteries of faith and the way we are called to respond to them; not the existence of God or a lack of Divine loving-mercy.
I believe it was St. Paul who wrote that there was nothing wrong in expecting payment for one’s service to the believing community even though he chose a self-supporting tent-maker ministry for himself.
I felt the offer to provide “transitional support” was more a sharing of learning experiences than dogmatic snobbery; but we all have our subjective intrepretive lenses.
I will always remember the Sunday School session where the pastor asked us to share our concepts of “heaven.” The best response came from Jack, someone who (until then), had always appeared to have a rather pedestrian faith: “Heaven is where there are no more misunderstandings.”
I am 69 years old and have neither the time, energy or technical skills to manage a blog.
However, if you are looking for good theological/spiritual formation, I recommend Fr. Richard Rohr’s webpage which provides daily email meditations in the Franciscan tradition as well as other excellent resources:
http://www.cacradicalgrace.org
That’s one interesting comment Woody.