"Praying in Anxious Times"

By David W. Johnson

It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes. Whether or not this is true is problematic, but it does contain a truth: People in extreme situations might find themselves praying, even if they do not normally pray or even believe. Anxious times drive people to prayer.

But does prayer work? Some would say, “Yes, my prayers were answered.” Some might say just the opposite: “I prayed, and nothing happened.”

In this article, I will discuss the principles of prayer in the works of two very different theologians: Julian of Norwich and Karl Barth. Julian was a woman of the fourteenth century who lived as a solitary in England. Barth was a twentiethcentury Swiss theologian and professor. Julian was a mystic whose only writings were drawn from a series of visions she experienced when she was very ill. Barth was a professor who wrote extensively and was one of the most influential theologians of modern times—and who tended to be suspicious of anything smelling of mysticism. On one level, they had little in common. But both lived through anxious times. Julian’s Norwich experienced bubonic plague and civil war. Barth lived through two world wars and their aftermath. They wrote on prayer at a time when both of their worlds were marked by uncertainty, suffering, and death. Consequently, we who also live in anxious times might have something to learn from them about prayer.

In his novel Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham writes on prayer (it has been suggested that the fictional episode reflects Maugham’s own experience).1 The hero of the novel, Philip Carey, is an orphan who lives with his aunt and clergyman uncle. Philip has a club foot.

Upon being told that prayer could move mountains if one only believed, Philip began to pray that his foot be healed. He even picked the day that the healing would occur. But it did not come about. Philip asked his uncle why miracles did not happen if one prayed and believed. His uncle replied that it would show that one did not have faith. Philip tried again, and again the miracle did not come. Philip concluded that no one ever had faith enough to receive such miracles. He started to wonder if his uncle had been playing a joke on him.

It must be said that the uncle’s response was rather cruel. It suggests that there is some deficiency on the part of the one who prays if the prayer does not seem to be answered. Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane surely demonstrates that the response to a prayer is not always tied to the faith of the one who offers the prayer. It might be presumptuous of Philip to select the day of the miracle, but he is a child asking for relief from an affliction. A bit of presumption in those circumstances can certainly be excused.

This incident, however fictional, does illustrate some of the difficulties people have with prayer—particularly, the issue of prayer being answered. Does belief, or the lack thereof, affect the results of prayer? In anxious times, when people are almost driven to prayer, is the depth of one’s faith the deciding factor? Is answered prayer somehow a reward for faith? We will explore such questions with Julian and Barth.

The details of the life of Julian of Norwich are almost unknown to us. The evidence is scanty: her own twice-written book, Revelations of Divine Love, or simply Showings; the account of Marjorie Kemp’s visit to Julian; and brief mention in some legal documents. She lived during the last half of the fourteenth and into the fifteenth century. She was an anchoress—that is a person who lived a life of solitude and seclusion. Julian lived in a one- or two-room cell attached to the church of St. Julian in Norfolk, England. After she had entered it, Julian would not have been allowed to leave her cell, but the townspeople could consult with her through a window. Julian thus would have functioned as the equivalent of a pastoral counselor or a spiritual director.2 Consequently, her teaching on prayer has a pastoral tone throughout.

Julian’s single known work, Showings, is an account of sixteen visions she received while she was gravely ill and near death.3 It exists in two versions: a short text recounting the visions, prepared shortly after Julian recovered from her illness, and a long text, written years later, which contains amplified theological reflection on the visions. The principal discussion of prayer is in the long text.4 From this discussion, the following principles of prayer can be adduced.

We pray to the one who loves us. Julian is, above all, the theologian of the love of God. The stress throughout Showings is that God loves us, created us out of love,

forgives and redeems us as an expression of love, and protects us because of love. The long text closes with these words: “And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting.”5 God’s love is the context for all prayer.

Consequently, Julian urges us to pray wholeheartedly. “Pray wholeheartedly,” she urges, “though you may feel nothing …”6 God rejoices in our prayer, even if prayer seems dry and empty to us.7 Julian’s pastoral care is evident here. She knows very well that prayer can seem fruitless and barren. But God sees it differently. The prayer that feels pointless to us is treasured by God. This leads us to a second principle:

The purpose of prayer is to unite us with God. Why pray at all? Julian is very clear: Our prayer conforms us to God’s will. Prayer, Julian says, unites the soul to God, “for he beholds us in love, and wants to make us partners in his good will and work.”8 This means that the principal work of prayer is our transformation. This transformation can be slow work and might not be immediately perceptible. Because of this, it might seem that our prayers are not answered, when the answer is really who we are becoming.

This surely involves our release from sin. Julian is well aware of human sin, but she is gentle about it: “For our courteous Lord does not want his servants to despair because they fall often and grievously; for our falling does not hinder him in loving us.”9 The very fact that we pray at all is an indication of God’s mercy: “But let us do what we can, and meekly ask mercy and grace, and everything which is lacking in us we will find in him.”10

It is natural in anxious times that we pray for the removal of the cause of our anxiety, and there is nothing wrong with this. But Julian teaches us to be attentive to our own transformation, no matter what is going on outside of us. Famously, Julian says that God has promised to make all things well.11 In fact, Julian urges us to pray for that which God has promised to do. We ourselves are among those things that God has promised to make well, and so we can trust that our spiritual healing is the fruit of our prayer.

Prayer begins in God. This is a constant in Julian’s understanding of prayer: We pray at God’s initiative. “I am the ground of your beseeching,” Christ says to her. There is in Julian something like a predestination of prayer: “For everything which our good Lord makes us to beseech he himself has ordained for us from all eternity. So here we may see that our beseeching is not the cause of the goodness and grace which he gives us, but his own goodness.”12 It is for this reason that Julian counsels us not to be disheartened but, again, to “pray wholeheartedly” when our prayers seem dry and dead. The fact that we pray at all is an indication that God is at work, both in us and in the world. How we feel about prayer varies, but God’s love does not.

Julian’s principles of prayer show us how to pray in anxious times. Her understanding of prayer is centered on God. We pray to the God who loves us, so we can pray with courage and trust. The purpose of prayer is to foster our unity with God and our participation in God’s work. Our prayer begins in God, so we can pray without undue self-regard or self-analysis. We can and will be anxious about our times, but there is no need to be anxious about God. All will be well.

Karl Barth remade Reformed theology in the twentieth century. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that Barth remade all of theology in the twentieth century. His literary output was enormous. Besides the fat volumes of the Church Dogmatics, he published histories of theology, sermons, biblical commentaries, essays, and collections of prayers. The contrast with Julian is stark: where she wrote and then rewrote a single book, Barth wrote thousands of pages. But they share a common concern. Both of their theologies are pastoral. Both wrote for the church. And both worked to help Christians be Christian.

Barth treated the topics that have come to be subsumed under the rubric of “spirituality” as matters of ethics. Worship, prayer, and confession—in the sense of the praise of God as well as the acknowledgment of sin—are, for Barth, matters of obedience. But that obedience is also the exercise of freedom. “Freedom” for Barth is never a choice between alternatives by which a human will be judged. Rather, it is the single path of obedience to God’s command. Freedom is something like enablement or empowerment. God’s gift of freedom and God’s command come together. Understanding what prayer is for Barth requires attention to both the gift and the command. Barth discusses both the gift and the command in conversation with virtually all the Christian tradition. Within that discussion, there are principles that help to address the issue of praying in anxious times.

We pray to the one who loves us. Here Karl Barth and Julian of Norwich are at one. Each is a theologian whose theology centers on God’s love. Indeed, Barth calls God, “The one who loves in freedom.”13 Prayer is commanded by God, Barth insists. Because God has given permission for humans to pray, God commands that humans pray. “That God loves man is the meaning of his command …”14 Knowing that we pray to the one who loves us means that we can pray in trust and without fear. God commands us to pray because God wants to hear our prayers and looks upon us with kindness even when our prayers are stumbling attempts to say what is on our minds and in our hearts.

God hears and answers all prayers. Barth does not make any distinctions when he discusses God’s hearing of prayer. He does not divide Christians from nonChristians, elect from reprobate, or saint from sinner. He certainly refuses to make God’s accepting of prayer a matter of technique, such as concluding prayers with phrases such as, “In Christ’s name.” Barth only speaks of those who pray as “children of God.” God hears God’s children: “No little hands, stretched out or folded before him, are too dirty to achieve something with him.”15

Barth does not fence prayers in. Discussing “Our Father” at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, he remarks, “What does ‘Our Father’ mean when the we who utter this cry are not, as God’s children, a private club with a sacred private end, but the people and community of his witnesses to all other men?”16 Witness as a task of the church is a key point in Barth’s ecclesiology, and it includes prayer. Prayer is communal—we pray to “Our Father” rather than “My Father.” Prayer is also a form of witness. The church that witnesses is made up of people who pray. God hears the prayers of the witnessing people, and God hears the prayers of those to whom the church witnesses.

God perfects our prayers. God hears and answers all prayers, but God works between the hearing and the answering. The answering is not automatic. It cannot be, because our prayers are the imperfect prayers of an imperfect people. “What would they be with all their prayers if he to whom they bring them did not have better knowledge—the very best—concerning what they need and want and desire?”17 Consequently, God perfects our prayers according to God’s own wisdom. “In the great and little matters with which his children approach him, he and he alone knows what is really and properly and fundamentally necessary, what is helpful and fruitful, what will truly be to his own glory and their salvation.”18 It is this perfected prayer to which God responds. “God’s hearing begins when he receives the prayer as he himself has transformed it.”19

This means that we can be confident that our prayers are answered even when they do not seem to be. But it also means that we might not recognize the answer to a prayer when it comes. Our perfected prayers and their answers might not be anything that we know as ours. So, we might think that God has ignored or rejected our prayers when in fact our prayers have been perfected. That a prayer has been answered might be a matter of faith and not sight.

If it is true that there are no atheists in foxholes, it is also true that life is full of foxholes. There is no shortage of anxious times in everyone’s life, and living through the COVID pandemic has compounded the anxiety. The world has become much more dangerous in the last two years than it had previously been. We are now, if we are not in total denial, afraid of our environment and each other in ways we had never been before. Life has become a giant foxhole. Which means that many of us will find ourselves praying. What can we say about praying in anxious times?

Following Julian and Barth, the first thing we can say is that God loves us and wants to hear our prayers. The world might have become much more hostile, but God is still God, and God is not hostile. Our prayers are not launched into an empty void. God hears.

We can also say that our prayers are always answered, but we might not recognize the answer. Julian suggests that the answer to prayer involves our transformation—which might not be apparent to us at any particular time. Barth tells us that it is our perfected prayers that are answered, but the answer might not be apparent to us at a particular time. They both agree that our prayers are answered, but discerning those answers could be a very elusive thing. The answers are real, but might be hidden—as is grace itself. However, Julian reminds us, the very fact that we pray is a sign that God is at work.

Philip Carey concluded that no one ever had faith enough to guarantee that prayers would produce miracles. That might well be true, particularly if one concludes that the efficacy of praying could be empirically verified. But it cannot. However one might sympathize with a small boy whose prayers for healing have not been answered, prayers and the answers to prayers are not proven or disproven by experience.

Praying is a matter of faith, even if it is the kind of faith that asks God to help our unbelief. But our anxiety is misplaced if it centers on our praying. God hears us in love and responds to us with love. However rocky our paths might become, we are accompanied by the one who loves us and to whom we can say, “Thy will be done.”

NOTES

1. W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (New York: Bantam Dell, 1991; originally published 1915).

2. A full discussion of what is known about Julian’s life and work can be found in Philip Sheldrake, Julian of Norwich: “In God’s Sight”: Her Theology in Context, (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2018).

3. Julian’s work has been translated several times. I am using the edition prepared by Edmund Colledge, O. S. A., and James Walsh, S. J.; Julian of Norwich, Showings, (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978). This contains both the short text and the long text. The long text is notable for an extended account of God as mother.

4. Showings, 248-255.

5. Showings, 342.

6. Showings, 249.

7. Showings, 249.

8. Showings, 253.

9. Showings, 245.

10. Showings, 253.

11. This is one of the most quoted parts of Julian’s work. Cf. Showings, 225.

12. Showings, 249. Julian often uses “beseeching” as a synonym for prayer.

13. Cf. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of God (Church Dogmatics II/1), ed. G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance, tr. T. H. L. Parker et al., (London, UK: T & T Clark, 1957). This is a cornerstone of Barth’s doctrine of God.

14. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Creation (Church Dogmatics III/4), ed. G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance, tr. A. T. Maclay et al., (London, UK: T & T Clark, 1961), 88.

15. Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Church Dogmatics IV/4: Lecture Fragments), tr. G. W. Bromily, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 107.

16. Christian Life, 100.

17. Christian Life, 107.

18. Christian Life, 107.

19. Christian Life, 107.

David Johnson retired in December 2021 after serving on the Austin Seminary faculty for twenty years, first as director of the Supervised Practice of Ministry and Certificate in Spiritual Formation programs and then as Associate Professor of Church History and Christian Spirituality. He served churches in Texas and New Jersey and taught at Brite Divinity School, and he is the author of Trust in God: The Christian Life and the Book of Confessions.