In previous months, we have had a series on prayer. The following develops on the aspect of the 'desert experiences'

There are periods in many Christians’ lives when they cannot hear God, even when they have encountered him in the past. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a priest and poet, powerfully expresses his experience about one such dark time in his life in these words:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you heart saw; ways you went!
And more must in yet longer lights’ delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas away! away.

Sadly much popular Protestant and charismatic theology does not pay sufficient attention to this experience. Like Cowper the eighteenth century hymn writer and poet who suffered from religious melancholia they attribute this sense of the absence of God to sin:

Where is the blessedness I knew
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
Of Jesus and his word?

Return, 0 holy dove, return,
Sweet messenger of rest;
I hate the sins that made thee mourn
And drove thee from my breast.

However, the truth is that desert or wilderness experiences are frequently found in the Bible among those who are closest to God. Jesus driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, or praying in Gethsemane, or in agony on the Cross experienced darkness or the dark night of the soul. Jeremiah cries out to God in complaint:

O Lord you have deceived me, and I was deceived;
You overpowered me and prevailed....
The word of the Lord has brought me
Insult and reproach all day long. (Jeremiah 20:7-8)

Similar passages can be found in Ezekiel, Job, Lamentations, the Psalms and the book of Revelation. These are testing experiences in which the reality of our faith is proved. Do we, as Satan suggests in the book of Job, serve God for what we can get out of him or out of love?

So what do we do? Firstly, Richard Foster suggests that we can learn the prayer of complaint. We are too polite to God. What we need to learn is that robust biblical language of prayer found in the psalms (e.g. Psalms 22 and 44) and the book of Job. Here’s a sample:

I will say to God: Do not condemn me, But tell me what charges you have against me.
Does it please you to oppress me, to spurn the work of your hands,
While you smile upon the schemes of the wicked? (Job 10:2-3)

Tell God how it is. How we long for him; how much we miss him; how hurt we feel about his apparent indifference to us.

Secondly, remember Jesus. He passed through similar experiences. He knew what it was to feel abandoned and rejected. He knew what it meant for the heavens to be silent, in the garden of tears and on the tree of blood. He screamed out: "My God, my God why have you abandoned me!" and that cry rang across the universe and out through time.

All it reached save one,
the one most sought,
who closed his ears
though heart reached out in yearning and whispered:
My son, my son, my dear, beloved son.
                                                   (From The Scream by Don Dowling)

This is the darkness where God is.

Thirdly, pray for those in darkness who have had no experience of God. Pray for the hopeless, the despairing, and the desperate. Then when the darkness lifts for you, you will have known what is to share in his sufferings and the power of his resurrection.

Don Dowling

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