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The writer Flannery O’Connor started a prayer journal when she was a young student about twenty. She began a journal of prayers, addressed to God. In it, she wrote: "I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You."
She kept her prayer journal for two years, then dropped it, calling her Soul “stupid and slothful”. “Dear Lord please make me want You .” “I am a cheese, make me a mystic immediately. . . . Her Soul “wants the God who made heaven and earth, to be its Lover. Immediately. . . . She judges herself and her writing as a “sham” and ends up feeling “very far away from God. He might as well not have made me. . . . Today I have proved myself a glutton — for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me." That was the end of the prayer journal.
Reading this was very sad. I too kept a prayer journal. When I was on a silent directed retreat I was able to let go of all judgments and, “egg up” (like puke) some coherent wisdom and deep emotions I had kept hidden.
The first time I took a weeklong silent retreat at a monastery in the 1980s, I felt like a religious hotshot. Solitude — no crockpot, no squabbles, no traffic — was mine. Within 24 hours, I became furious. Why was no one speaking to me? Why were they all so rude — monks, nuns, and everyone? Be patient. Wait for God? Baloney, I thought.
I felt helpless and alone. I wrote letters of rage and sorrow to God. Slowly, a surge of safety and truth, wrapped in silence, rose up inside me. I met my self.
Alone but not lonely.
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