Young Adult
Whether it is a scene in a movie where you actually get to see the prayer unfold or a story of real events recounted by the person after the fact, I am always so moved by an honest, angry prayer.
Matt Dahlia, one of the founders of the YouTube channel “Yes Theory,” recounts on his Substack the story of one such prayer. He spent a month alone in a cabin writing. For the first week and a half, he struggled with insomnia. After waking up at 2 a.m. one of the nights, he got up and started to process all of the things with which he had been struggling.
He writes about the event, “I didn’t believe in God at the time, there was no sense of connection to the universe, no proof of Higher Power. In fact, quite the opposite. I sensed nothing but betrayal. How could I feel so terrible if there was a God? How could the world be so brutal, so unjust? How could my childhood have been so chaotic, my body so constantly hyper-vigilant for so long? This is what I started to yell directly at the one in charge.” After letting loose for an hour, shouting all his anger and vitriol at the God he didn’t know if he believed in, he collapsed, exhausted. And that is when he heard the still, small voice: a voice he recognized as not his own. It simply said, “I still love you.” And that changed his life.
I am stopped in my tracks by the beauty of these stories. I am stopped in my tracks because people who have experiences like these in prayer will never be the same. They have brought the most raw and honest version of themselves and laid it bare before God. The God who waits on our invitation, who will not ever violate our freedom, has been given access to the deepest places of their heart. And that is where real change happens, where real relationships can grow.
My anxious, pious younger self would have been afraid of the anger. She would have said, “We know that God is all-good and all-knowing. We know ultimately that he must be the one who is in the right here. It must be futile as well as wrong to yell at him, to fight with him, unleash all the depths of our anger against someone who is obviously in the right.” That is why, when my younger self was struggling beneath a crushing weight of grief and confusion, she had to be told over and over again, “You have to be honest with God. He can take it.” Because of that advice, I was able to take my cue from Jacob wrestling with God in the Old Testament and from Jesus saying on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Because of that advice, I learned from experience that full honesty with God is the only way to build a relationship with him. I learned that, if you find yourself angry with him, it does not help to pretend that you aren’t angry with him. But if you keep faithfully bringing that anger to him, your relationship with him will mysteriously grow in strength and in intimacy. After all, “Israel,” the name of the Chosen People, means “he who wrestles with God.”
Recently, I went to a Bible study where we prayed with the story of the Agony in the Garden, as told in Mark’s Gospel, and I was struck by another iteration of this theme. I have heard many times the prayer Jesus makes as he struggles with the anticipation of his coming Passion, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will, but what you will.” But I actually had forgotten that he starts with “All things are possible to you.” He presumably begins that way because a good prayer always begins with anamnesis – with remembering who God is and what he has done. But it reminded me of something else. There is a very specific grief to the moments when you really do viscerally know that God is capable of doing the thing you want him to do and he does not do it. When your desire is so profound there is no earthly reason to distinguish it from a need, when your desire is so good that its absence feels like a sabotaging of your growth in holiness, when the loss of what was desired feels like an actual death — then the space between “please” and “your will not mine” becomes almost impossibly far.
The consolation of the passage is that it feels that way to Jesus too. Mark says, “He began to be greatly distressed and troubled. And he said to them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” Another translation says he was “crushed by grief.” If Jesus felt that way in saying “yes”, it must be OK if I also sometimes feel “crushed by grief” and “sorrowful, even to death” on my way to eking out a “yes.” Maybe perfect holiness would never need to direct its anger towards God. But maybe we have to learn to be honest, even about our anger, if we want to grow in the perfect holiness to which we are called.
God has the power to redeem everything. He brought all of our darkness with him to the Crucifixion so that we, in our brokenness, could also share in his Resurrection. But he waits on our yes. If we never give him what is raw and difficult and real, how will he redeem it?
