When Feelings Fail, Lift Up Your Heart Anyway
After four weeks of teaching Anglican worship, I opened the floor for questions among our group. I expected questions on topics such as the liturgical calendar, the sign of the cross, and symbols in worship. Then I saw one more hand with a question, not about Anglican tradition, but about the heart. “How am I supposed to take communion on the days when I don’t feel anything?”
Asking that question took courage, and my sister articulated a question and experience for many believers. Is it dishonest to sing joyfully or pray holy words when you feel no emotion within?
Emotions are as predictable as the wind. The instability of one’s emotions raises the question of authentic worship. Can worship be authentic when you feel dead inside? Is it hypocritical to pray when you feel hollow within?
Praying When Exhausted
One need look no further than the psalms for wisdom with these questions. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, the psalms are ‘the prayerbook of the Bible.’ Anytime one brings questions about authentic prayer and worship, we must turn to the psalms first.
In Psalm 38, David confesses that his suffering so weakened him that he’s barely able to speak:
O Lord, all my longing is before you; my sighing is not hidden from you. My heart throbs; my strength fails me, and the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me.
I am like a deaf man; I do not hear, like a mute man who does not open his mouth. I have become like a man who does not hear, and in whose mouth are no rebukes.1
David’s weakened moments, painful though they be, became a school for learning authentic worship. When he was most empty, David learned that his emptiness and brokenness were, in fact, the most important offering of his heart:
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.2
Where the psalms give words for prayer in times of weakness and brokenness, the Gospels give us stories of the same. In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in the heat of the day. She was exhausted in spirit (John 4.14-16) and Jesus was exhausted in body. Very soon, the conversation turns toward the subject of true worship. I find it comforting that Jesus taught the truth about pure worship in a setting of heat and exhaustion. The Samaritan woman wonders about the correct location for worship, whether that was Jerusalem or other sacred sites. Jesus responds saying:
true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth…God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. 3
Authentic worship is an offering from the spirit, which is not the same as one’s emotions. The human spirit is deeper than emotion. The spirit is ‘the hidden person of the heart’, the ‘inner self’, which still moves toward God in prayer and worship, even when no accompanying emotions can be felt.
Worship from the Heart
The call of worship is to make an offering from the heart. Both in Scripture and the spiritual theology of the desert fathers, the Greek word ‘nous’ expressed the mysterious depths of the heart. One’s affections and feelings are certainly within one’s heart, within the nous. Yet, the heart remains active even when one feels numb. Prayer is possible when we do not know ‘what to pray for as we ought,’ as St Paul said. ‘The Holy Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words.’4
Attention > Emotions
On the whole, giving God our attention is more important than tangible affections. Emotions and affections are so often self-oriented rather than other-oriented. Attention, on the other hand, draws the heart outward.
The Latin meaning of attention is a helpful word picture here. Attention means ‘to strain toward.’ The image of straining toward a goal also implies deliberate effort, effort that, at times, becomes difficult.
When I have no tangible emotions in prayer, I have learned to focus on my attention. To concentrate on Christ, even with a sentence prayer such as the Jesus Prayer, is a sacrifice of worship. I heard someone once describe the contemplative life as ‘paying attention to what you’re paying your attention.’ To fix my thoughts on Christ takes effort, yet this is an act of love even when emotions are absent.
Worship is work. Liturgy literally means ‘the work of the people.’ Some days, some seasons, even some years, prayer and worship will require great effort. Yet Scripture and the saints attest that this is the purest offering we can give. When we do not emotionally benefit from the offering of worship, we are giving a selfless offering, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to bless God for who He is.
Make An Offering
In her scriptural and historical study of Christian worship, Evelyn Underhill summarized the essential place of sacrifice in the life of prayer:
Sacrifice is the sum of worship, the way in which man must approach God, his first lesson in creaturely love. For sacrifice is a positive act. Its essence is something given; not something given up. It is a freewill offering, a humble gesture which embodies and expresses with more or less completeness the living heart of religion; the self-giving of the creature to its God….Real sacrifice is essentially a movement of generosity. Without it, worship may easily degenerate into emotional admiration.5
We were made to return all the goodness of creation back to God in sacrificial acts of thanksgiving. When feelings fail, our hearts are being purified from mere admiration to offering true adoration. If ‘real sacrifice is a movement of generosity,’ then the movement of our hearts toward the Triune God is a selfless movement of lovingkindness.
To Pray with a Holding Cross
When my wife and I experienced the miscarriage of our third child, I was utterly empty inside. Death is a thief, separating the living from those they love. Death also leaves us bereft of words and feelings. Some days I felt numb, unable to comprehend our loss. Other days I wanted to be numb because the ache seemed like it would never end.
Shortly after this death, a dear friend and brother gave me a simple and holy gift in those days of grief: a holding cross. He said to me, “When you hold onto this cross, know that we bear your cross with you.” Prayer was simply a grip during those days. My attention was not mental, it was manual; five fingers gripping the cross.
Austin Farrer helped me see that Christ is the only way we can lift up our hearts, and especially when we bear our crosses:
All his life long Christ’s love burnt towards the heart of heaven in a bright fire, until he was wholly consumed in it, and went up in that fire to God. The fire is kindled on our altars, here Christ ascends in fire; the fire is kindled in the Christian heart, and we ascend. He says to us, Lift up your hearts; and we reply, We lift them up unto the Lord.” 6
Lifting Up Our Hearts With the Church
There’s a final aspect of worship when feelings fail: worship is a communal action, never dependent on the waxing or waning emotions of one individual. Christ is the head of his Body, the Church. We are members of this Body individually, which means we belong to one another in all seasons.
If on a given Sunday, or even a season of Sundays, one becomes like David in Psalm 38, unable to speak, it does not mean that one ceases praying. Especially in seasons such as these, one’s presence in the Body of Christ is the offering of worship. The act of attending worship is a sacrifice. Sometimes one’s strength is spent even before worship begins. I remember David’s prayer in Psalm 71, ‘forsake me not when my strength is spent.’7
Even when one’s strength is spent, we are not alone when we approach the throne of grace. Belonging to the Church often means that we’re saying with our presence ‘help me offer an offering.’
When the Church comes to the Table of the Lord, the priest addresses all members of the Church, ‘Lift up your hearts!’ The liturgical response to this invitation carries so much weight, so much meaning, so much heart for those who feel nothing: ‘We lift them up to the Lord!’ On days of weakness, these words arethe sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, the giving of one’s self to God. Yet a self-giving that is neither isolated nor private. It is a self-giving offered with the Body of Christ that ascends in worship with hope and trust that all its members will ‘taste and see that the Lord is good.’ And what goodness will the faithful taste? The broken bread and poured out wine, which become the Body and Blood of Christ, who gave his very self an offering and sacrifice to God for our redemption.
