Prayer time 20 May 2026
But no hearing
Slow growth is not slow answers.
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
Some prayers seem to be exactly where they were days, weeks or months ago when we first prayed them. In most of these, we know we have been regular and faithful, bringing matters to God in prayer. We’ve sat in the silence, and we’ve not been worried. We’ve learned what it means to rest in God rather than strain toward God. Our prayers have been said with ease; we have released the struggles. And yet … some situations remain: a relationship still adrift, our finances still pinched, a person you or I love still somewhere out there, our love not able to reach them.
Listen to what C.S. Lewis wrote, as a fellow traveller rather than a teacher, in the last book he completed before his death:
Our struggle is — isn't it? — to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.
C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1964.
Tonight we bring those prayers. We bring those apparent lingering 'situations' to God in prayer. Gather up your problems, issues, situations, drama, uncertainties and calamities.
Here we are, as we are, with what is ours to carry.
In this place, may you experience the promise of Jesus that your burden is easy and the yoke is light.
Haere mai, welcome.
Relaxation
We'll take a moment to relax and settle where we are. Feel the chair, the floor, the weight of your body settling. Let your shoulders come down. Let your jaw unclench.
And that breath you've been holding, you know, that shallow breath, give it some full lovey deep cycles, then just let it return to a normal rhythm. Grinding teeth, clenched jaw, let it go.
[Pause]
Breathing in, breathing out….
Let your breath find its own rhythm.
This lovely you that has arrived without things being resolved from the day or the broader big picture of your life … let it all curl up in your lap, or sit to the side of you, but bring it in. This is me.
[Pause]
Slowly, let the outer world step back. Our phones, our families, our unfinished work and jobs, the burdens of the heart, the mental chatter … it's all there, it doesn't cease to exist just because we gather to pray, but it's got its own life, out there, doing and being whatever it needs to do and be.
We are choosing to lay it all down now. Just put it down.
Those deep deep sadnesses, a buried grief, or an exciting future ahead. We carry it all in with us, but we lay it down.
[Pause]
Breathe into the base of your spine. Feel the ground. Feel whatever is under you, doing the work of holding you up. You do not have to hold yourself up right now. You can be held.
[Silence]
In this Unity practice we speak of God as the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. That means the centre is here. Right where we are, God is. Here, in this room, in this chair, in this body, in this particular breath. The Presence you have been praying toward is not elsewhere. Let that land.
[Silence]
Take one more breath. In, and out. And we will move together into tonight's prayer.
Concentration
Before we do anything else tonight, let me name some situations that we are most likely carrying — or a variant of these. When I say these, you will recognise what is true for you.
There is someone here who offered their best: their creative work, the thing they made and put into the world with everything they had. They have offered their best years and their peak performance. And the return has not come. Finances are tight. Expansion and growth is behind you. Your creative work, your problem solving, your solutions offered are out there, yet the 'silence is emphatic.’
There is someone here who has been praying for a child or a grandchild, and that child is still in the place where you cannot reach them. It may be addiction. Or depression. An eating disorder. A situation of apathy or lack of direction. It could be distance, simply physical distance. You remain in prayer. And yes, the situation as you see it, has not changed.
There is someone here whose faith is intact but whose life does not yet reflect it. And there is a small voice that says: perhaps you are doing faith wrong. Perhaps you do not believe correctly. Perhaps the insufficiencies are your fault.
Well, in prayer this evening, we are addressing this.
The lack of answers isn't the truth. We will come to that.
In our recent prayer time we had a poem called ‘Prayer’ by George Herbert. Greg and I run off to poetry analogies and online collections, so let's use Mr Herbert again here. Herbert was a priest and a poet in 17th-century England — it appears he knew this condition of 'no-one hearing my prayers' better than most. Here for you, his poem ‘Denial.’
When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears,
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse;
My breast was full of fears
And disorder.
My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,
Did fly asunder:
Each took his way; some would to pleasures go,
Some to the wars and thunder
Of alarms.
As good go anywhere, they say,
As to benumb
Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come!
But no hearing.
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To cry to thee,
And then not hear it crying! All day long
My heart was in my knee,
But no hearing.
Therefore my soul lay out of sight,
Untuned, unstrung:
My feeble spirit, unable to look right,
Like a nipped blossom, hung
Discontented.
O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhyme.
George Herbert, ‘Denial,’ from The Temple, 1633.
Notice what he does at the end. He does not resolve the problem. He asks for resolution. He ends on a prayer, not a declaration. Mend my rhyme. The harmony has broken. He is asking God to restore it. And he is still praying, still in messy, chaotic honest-from-the-soul prayer, right from inside the condition of unanswered prayer.
C.S. Lewis, who read Herbert deeply, writes about exactly this condition in Letters to Malcolm. He writes as a friend to a friend, not as a theologian pronouncing on the faithful. He says:
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree.
I don't agree. He is disagreeing with the shame.
And then he says this:
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
The prayer in Gethsemane. The night before his death, Jesus prayed:
‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’
Matthew 26:39, NRSV.
Jesus brought an unanswered prayer to God. The cup did not pass.
If we could think on this for a moment: could this 'but no hearing' be a model of prayer? The Gethsemane Model? For most of us, in most of our praying lives, Gethsemane is the model. Those grisly real-me prayers — prayers that aren't good girl or good boy performance prayers — when we have no pretence, but a lot of expectation and faith. And we think these prayers are held in love, and are received in ways we could not have predicted or chosen.
Prayers that inspire a poem called ‘Denial,’ that asserts God is not hearing.
Prayers that drive a Christian philosopher to suggest the rightness and okayness with a prayer model that appears to end 'unanswered.’
Relax if this is true for you, as it is true for me and for many, many, many pray-ers throughout the ages.
We are in good company tonight.
The Gethsemane prayer again:
‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’
Matthew 26:39, NRSV.
What is not heard?
What have you thought is the result of the defect of your faith?
Can we hear, find cheer and tune for our heartless breast?
Meditation
Let me ask you to turn all your attention toward one image.
The sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
The centre of that sphere is here. No reaching, grasping, striving by any of us. God, here, present and presence. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do about that. God is completely, permanently, inescapably present. Omnipresence.
The question that unanswered prayer puts to us is this: where is God in this?
The situation we bring to God in prayer has not changed.
Does that mean the Presence has withdrawn?
No. Emphatically, no. It does not.
Lewis wrote that prayer is not the attempt to alter a sovereign agent acting in the world from the outside. It is participation in a living whole, made like a work of art, ‘to which every being makes its contribution and, in prayer, a conscious contribution, and in which every being is both an end and a means.’
The course of your life is not governed like a state, subject to petitions that may or may not move a distant monarchy.
It is made like a work of art, and your love is woven into it.
We are children of the Most High God. As Paul writes: ‘it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.’ Romans 8:16, NRSV. The same Spirit that intercedes within our prayer confirms who we are.
Our prayers are our conscious contribution to a living whole that is still being made.
Your faithfulness … your persistent showing up … your raw, unedited, still-praying prayer: these are not wasted. Never a wasted prayer. They are prayers woven into the fabric of your life, and that life is still, and always, being made.
The centre of the sphere is here. And in that omnipresence, in a God who cannot be elsewhere and who has no elsewhere, the answer is not waiting at a distance for the right conditions to be met. The answer is already in the field. Already present in the prayer itself.
What appears as 'no hearing' is still omnipresence. The prayer is in the presence of God. It is only our perception of time, and of form that makes these prayers appear (at least to us) as unanswered.
The mountain has not moved in the way we could see it move. But the fullness of God's provision, the wholeness that is the deeper truth of every condition, is already present.
This is not spiritual bypassing. This is not a way of saying: stop wanting what you want. Stop feeling what you feel. Lewis is helpful to us in this: we are not to become high-minded about this. He wrote that we should lay before God what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
You are allowed to want a closer relationship with your children. You are allowed to want the finances to release. You are allowed to bring the raw, unedited, still-praying prayer.
All of it is received. All of it belongs here, in the field of prayers out beyond right-doing and wrong-doing.
And the answer is already in the field.
Both of these are true simultaneously, without contradiction. The raw prayer and the ground already holding the answer. The unresolved situation and the sphere whose centre is here. The ‘but no hearing’ and the Love that has never stopped listening.
[Silence]
Let us rest here. In the silence that is not the absence of God, but the fullness of a Presence that needs no words.
The silence often seems emphatic. Herbert felt that. Lewis named it. You have known it.
The silence is not absence.
The centre of the sphere is here.
Realisation
We pray now from what we know.
And oh, you may say, ‘we have prayed so much already.’
Let us remember that every prayer brought, however hollow it felt in the bringing, has been received. The asking is part of the giving. The love that kept showing up is already woven into the field.
We begin with what we release.
I release the thought that my unanswered prayer is evidence of insufficient faith.
I bring my full reality to God, and my full reality is received.
I release the voice that says: if you had believed correctly, this mountain would have moved.
There is no version of my prayer that falls outside God's hearing. The Listener is here.
I release the anxiety that the silence means absence.
The silence is the ground of my prayer, not a gap. The centre of the sphere is here.
Now, affirmatively:
The prayer I have been carrying is known to God. It has always been known.
I do not need to add eloquence or correct feeling to what I bring. I lay before God what is in me, not what ought to be in me.
The answer is already moving in the field. I am open to what I cannot yet see.
I am the weaned child, and I am at rest.
I hold the ones I love in the ground of Love.
My persistent prayer is a sign of love, doing what love does.
The course of my life is made like a work of art, and God’s love is woven in.
All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, c.1395.
I rest in God. My love is my prayer. And that prayer has always already been heard.
Appreciation
We give thanks.
For every prayer brought in faithfulness, whether the answer has come or is still on its way.
For the Gethsemane model: the honest prayer, held in love, received in ways we could not have predicted or chosen.
For the Love that has never stopped listening. The Love that receives the raw prayer and the hollow prayer and the prayer said so many times the words have worn smooth, and receives it all.
[Pause]
We pray together the prayer Jesus taught us, in the language of this land.
E tō mātou Matua i te rangi,
Kia tapu tŏu ingoa.
Kia tae mai tŏu rangatiratanga.
Kia meatia tāu e pai ai
ki runga i te whenua,
kia rite anō ki tō te rangi.
Hōmai ki a mātou āianei
he taro mā mātou mō tēnei rā.
Murua ō mātou hara,
me mātou hoki e muru nei
i ō te hunga e hara ana ki a mātou.
Āua hoki mātou e kawea kia whakawaia;
Engari whakaorangia mātou i te kino:
Nŏu hoki te rangatiratanga, te kaha,
me te korōria,
Āke ake ake. Āmine.
Matiu 6:9-13, Te Paipera Tapu.
We go back into our lives, into the situations not yet resolved, the people we are still holding in love. We go as people who know where the centre is, and who have learned that the silence is not the absence of God.
We go under James Dillet Freeman’s ‘Prayer of Protection’:
The light of God surrounds us.
The love of God enfolds us.
The power of God protects us.
The presence of God watches over us.
Wherever we are, God is.
And all is well.
The prayer recognises you before you recognise it.
Tihei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ