The Prayer of Silence
“I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have poured out my soul before the LORD,” 1 Samuel 1:15
The Prayer of Silence
Poured Out – According to many Jewish sages, the prayer of Hannah is the epitome of human prayer. It is the prayer of a heart overwhelmed by distress and devotion. But not a single word was spoken aloud. Her lips moved but there was no sound. That’s why Eli the priest thought she was drunk. Hannah had a better explanation. She was so consumed with her pleading before the Lord that spoken words failed her. All she could do was pour out her heart in silence.
There are times when spoken prayer is important. For most of us, the exercise of prayer requires vocalization. It probably shouldn’t but we soon discover that praying without speaking tends to let our minds wander. Even privately, we pray better when we pray aloud. Nevertheless, Hannah shows us deeper prayer. When our souls are so overcome with emotion that the intensity of our prayers pushes all sound away, we connect with the Spirit in a manner that only God needs to hear. Perhaps this is what Paul meant centuries later when he wrote about the Spirit praying unutterable things for us.
Shaphak, to pour out, is found in Psalm 42:4, Psalm 62:8 and Lamentations 2:11. Each occurrence describes emptying the heart before the Lord. When we reach this point in prayer, we find the Father’s heart of compassion. Our agendas disappear. They are absorbed into the will of the One who loves us beyond measure.
The strange thing about the prayer of silence is that it usually takes intense emotional pain for us to reach this place. We might imagine that the intimacy of prayer would be so desirable that we would come to prayer with completely open hearts, always pouring out who we are before the Father. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. Instead, we come with assumptions, agendas, purposes and plans of our own. Too often we pray as though we were filling out a to-do list or a bank loan. We need to reflect on the prayer of Hannah. God brings us to those moments of emotional intensity not so that we will throw up our hands and complain about life but so that we will be able to cross over the river of our own preoccupations and touch His heart. It is our pain that brings us closest to God. When we pray to avoid the intensity brought about by pain, we move away from the God who suffers for us. There is a powerful example in Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. His pain opened the heart of God.
Do you seek prayer with this intensity, where distress commands silence before the lover of your soul?
