Nineteen Years For One Person

Ignacio says the same name every week and he has stopped being able to tell whether he means it.

Nineteen years. It is his brother and the situation has not changed and there is no reason on any available evidence to think it will.

At the start it was fervent. He can remember what the first two years felt like: it was an ache, and he prayed it out of the ache, and it cost him something every time.

Somewhere in about year six that stopped. Not the praying. The ache.

And what has been happening since is that he says the name, and asks the thing, and it takes about eleven seconds, and it is entirely sincere in the sense that he is not lying and entirely mechanical in the sense that nothing moves in him at all.

He has decided several times that this is worse than not praying. He has never acted on that decision.

He is fifty-one, and the specific thing that bothers him is not that the situation has not changed. He made his peace with that around year nine and he is not angry with God about it.

It is that he suspects a rote prayer is not a prayer, and that he has therefore not actually prayed for his brother since about 2012, and that the weekly eleven seconds is a man keeping a habit rather than a man asking for anything.

You may know that eleven seconds.

Maybe you also have a name you have said for years. Maybe yours also went quiet somewhere in the middle. And maybe you have also wondered whether what you are doing still counts.

The reason the parable is told

There is a place in Luke where the reason for a parable is stated before the parable itself, which is unusual, and the stated reason is exactly your question.

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.Luke 18:1

Not to faint.

The word means to lose heart, to give out, to grow weary and stop. And the parable that follows is about a woman who keeps going to a judge, repeatedly, over a long period, about the same matter.

Notice what the stated purpose is not. It is not that men ought always to pray fervently. It is not about the temperature of the praying at all. The thing Jesus is addressing is the risk of stopping, and the parable He tells to address it features a woman whose distinguishing characteristic is that she keeps turning up.

She is not commended for her feelings. Nothing is said about them. She is commended for continuance.

Which puts your eleven seconds in a completely different position from the one you have assigned them. You have been treating them as evidence of a failed prayer life. They are, in the terms that passage actually uses, the thing being commended: a man who has not fainted in nineteen years.

And you have not fainted, which is the thing that passage is about. The written word states the purpose as praying and not fainting and then tells a story about persistence rather than intensity, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has decided several times that he is doing this wrong.

And healing is His and the asking is yours. The word never once makes the asking's quality the mechanism, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than grading eleven seconds.

What year six actually was

Now the ache, because you dated its departure precisely and you have read it as a loss.

An ache is what a body does about a new grief. It is not a sustainable state and it is not supposed to be; a person who felt in year nineteen what they felt in year one would not have survived to year nineteen.

What happened around year six is that a nervous system did what nervous systems do, and the acute thing became a chronic thing, and chronic things do not hurt in the same way. That is not spiritual cooling. It is the ordinary physiology of carrying something for a long time.

And you kept praying through the transition without noticing that the transition was physiological rather than spiritual, and you have been reading a normal biological change as evidence about your heart for thirteen years.

And what left in year six was an acute response rather than your love for him. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover a nervous system as well as a soul.

And nothing about you is under review for eleven mechanical seconds. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has quietly suspected he stopped praying in 2012.

Whether rote counts

One more, plainly, because it is the actual question and it deserves an answer rather than a comfort.

A rote prayer is a prayer.

The reason is not that feelings do not matter. It is that the alternative view produces something nobody would accept if it were stated: that the value of a request depends on the emotional state of the person making it, which would mean God attends to the articulate and the freshly wounded and rather less to the exhausted, the long-suffering and the depressed.

Nobody believes that. It only survives while it is unstated, which is where it has been living in you since about year nine.

And what you say every week is a request and not a performance. The word has a widow commended for turning up rather than for how she felt about it, and the Spirit is the one who makes continuance count when a man cannot feel anything at all.