Job prayed in the dark. David prayed in the dark. Esther fasted and prayed in the dark. Daniel prayed in the dark. Jonah prayed in the dark, quite literally! A Sunday School teacher was trying to get a class of 6 year old boys to imagine what it must have been like for Jonah, so he asked them what they would do if they found themselves trapped in the belly of a large fish. One said, “I would build a fire and burn a hole and crawl out.” Another offered, “I’d stomp on his tongue until he spit me out.” A third said, “I’d cry out real loud till my Daddy comes to get me.” That last reply captures the essence of what praying in the dark is all about.
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The Apostle Paul prayed in the dark about his “thorn in the flesh.” Jesus prayed in the dark on the cross crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He felt alone and abandoned, yet he kept on praying.
Sue Monk Kidd in her book, When the Heart Waits, points out that in Gethsemane Jesus asked his disciples to sit and wait up while he prayed. He didn’t ask them to pray for him, to plead his case, but to sit and watch while he prayed. Is that what Jesus asks us to do when we face the crisis and darkness overwhelms us? Is it to sit and watch while he prays? Maybe this is what Paul talks about in Romans 8:26 when he says, “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” When words fail us and we feel alone and abandoned, we might do best to just sit and open ourselves up to the company of the Spirit praying within, penetrating, speaking, and holding us in our darkness.
We have all been taught to affirm that God is Omnipresent, fully present everywhere. In our experience, however, He seems at times to be very close and at other times far away. David was certainly aware of this tension. In Psalm 139:7-8 he prayed, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths you are there.” But the same man also cried, “How long will you hide your face from me?” (13:1).
Christian mystics referred to the experience of Deus Absconditus, the hiddenness of God. We tend to emphasize the nearness of God. We speak of having a "personal relationship with God” and learning to “hear the voice of God.” Some Christians preface sentences with “the Lord showed me . . . ” and “the Lord told me that . . . ” as though they had an uninterrupted, direct line to heaven. And so we don’t know what to do with those times when the heavens are silent and our prayers don’t seem to go beyond the ceiling.