Finding the Voice to Pray

Prayer is strange. Sometimes it’s akin to shouting out loud in a dark barn without any sense of who or what will reply, if anyone at all, or whether the reply will come in a language we can immediately understand. But when you reach down into the discipline of prayer, you understand that the shout itself is important, that to want to find the holy is to want to find your own soul. What begins prayer is a search and what ends it is a finding, not of the mind, not of the heart, but of the mind’s heart.

Yet to pray is to invite uncertainty. And many guides to prayer are too sentimental or simplistic to provide any help. Whether Jane Redmont is gazing at icons or practicing healing prayer or “waking in the night: when you cannot pray,” she provides in “When in Doubt, Sing” an intelligent and compassionate guide to prayer and daily practice. Her tone, her own story and her good writing infuse the book with a trustworthy authenticity: This is a woman who knows about prayer, in all its patterns, depths and turns.

Divided into 27 short chapters, which include prayers taken from such traditional and contemporary sources as the wonderful New Zealand Prayer Book, Janet Morley, Kathleen Norris and the Psalms, “When in Doubt, Sing” opens with “Begin where you are, not where you ought to be.” From there it gets into specifics: mantras, petitions, intercessory prayer, lectio divina (reading and praying), singing and prayer, building a daily practice.

“What is prayer?” Redmont asks in her introduction. “A sentence, paragraph, or page of definition would not bring us much closer to the doing of prayer. I keep hearing Jesus’ words to his would-be disciples . . . [when] they asked him, ‘Where do you live?’ ‘Come and see,’ he answered. Come and see.”

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A feminist Roman Catholic theologian, Redmont is studying for her doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She has worked as a chaplain and a social justice minister and has directed the National Conference on Christians and Jews. Born of Jewish parents, she converted to Catholicism as a young adult. Her life has not been simple, and her work reflects it.

Redmont suggests slowing down as a preamble to prayer--”Love has its speed,” she quotes a Japanese theologian, “at 3 miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks.” But she acknowledges that “much depends on temperament, circumstance and time of life.” Redmont says she prays outdoors more and uses icons and candles, fleshly things.

Redmont’s own story is woven throughout, but most poignantly in the chapter “From Where Will My Help Come? Praying During Depression.” After finishing her first book, “Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today,” she took on a demanding job and then suffered from serious anxiety attacks and depression. “Sometimes it seemed as if the electrical wiring inside my brain was short-circuiting. No amount of deep breathing, yoga and fresh air seemed to help.” One night, desperate with panic, she read the Psalms out loud, especially Psalm 6--”Oh, Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.”

When on a business trip to New York City, overcome with panic and increasingly suicidal thoughts, she prayed on the street to “every saint I could think of in that moment.” She checked herself into a hospital for several weeks, went on antidepressants and began to slowly recover. Each phase of her illness required different kinds of prayer, and no prayer “worked” or “made everything all right,” but all the prayers added up. Redmont’s strongest writing is in this chapter.

“Asking for help: Again and again it came down to this. Help from therapists, from family, from God, from the local bank, from colleagues and friends. Help with the fear, help with the rent, help with untangling the emotional knot, help with employment, help with prayer.” Toward the end of the book, Redmont talks more about communal prayer and prayers for justice. Prayer at its most profound is countercultural: It requires us to feel the ache in the heart for both love and justice, for the place Jesus called the kingdom. A friend of Redmont says it is “the never-ending work of trying to bring more alignment between what you hope for and how you live.”

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Nora Gallagher is the author of “Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith.”