Transformation in Prayer as We Age

Several years ago, my family began to tell me that I needed hearing aids. I was reluctant. I wasn’t that old! Others must just not be speaking loud enough. Eventually I gave in, got hearing aids, and now I find that people are speaking much more clearly!

But as I age, I am finding that hearing challenges go even deeper. Though my hearing aids help me hear what is going on outside of me, I need help hearing what God is saying to me about transformation within. I need God’s help especially when I pray and God answers in silence, rather than doing what I want.

As a young person, when I prayed, I asked God to bless my life, my relationships and my activities, usually with never-ending prayer requests. In my senior years I am discovering something new in my experience of prayer. God is inviting me to a personal communion with him that is dependent only on his love, not on my expectations about myself and what I would like him to do. The account of Elijah’s experience in the Old Testament reminds me of this.
Elijah lived in difficult times. He was afraid. He complained to God that he had served God well and now other people were neglecting God’s work. He felt alone. He even wanted to die (see 1 Kings 19:1-10).

Many of us have similar feelings as we get older. We face new fears and, if we are honest, we have many complaints about ourselves and other people. On our worst days, we are tempted to wonder if our life is worthwhile.

God listened to Elijah’s complaints. In response, God told Elijah, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by” (1 Kings 19:11, NRSV). God sent a strong wind, an earthquake, and then a fire. Yet God was not in any of those things. Then came the “sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12, NRSV). And it was from the silence that God spoke.
In my younger days, I was excited about dramatic events from God, obvious answers to my prayers. But for Elijah, and for us as we age, God may respond to our prayers with the sound of “sheer silence.” It is in this silence that we find transformation.

But for Elijah, and for us as we age, God may respond to our prayers with the sound of “sheer silence.” It is in this silence that we find transformation.

The Silence of God

God is often silent these days when I pray about the diminishments of age, particularly the unrelenting fatigue I experience. Friends of mine tell me they are praying for a resolution to health issues or for God to replace lost opportunities to serve. Other friends tell me they ask God most often to take away their loneliness, their dependence on others, or their boredom.

The specifics are different for each of us, but when God doesn’t answer our prayers as we expect, many of us risk falling into self-doubt—or maybe it would be more accurate to say God-doubt. But the issue, I am finding, is not with our doubts. It is with the expectations we have as we listen for God’s voice in this season.

I am coming to realize that when I pray about the limitations that come with age, the answer is not, as I’d first hoped, a reversal of the losses I am experiencing. Instead, God’s answer is often silence. And in the silence is a deeper awareness of God’s presence—even in my losses.
Mother Teresa is someone who learned to listen for God’s presence in silence. In a conversation with news anchor Dan Rather, he asked her about prayer. The conversation apparently went like this:

Rather: “When you pray, what do you say to God?”
Teresa: “I don’t say anything, I listen.”
Rather: “Well okay … when God speaks to you, then, what does he say?”
Teresa: “He doesn’t say anything. He listens. … And if you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”

God might say something similar about my prayers about getting older. “I am listening. But I can’t explain it to you yet.” In God’s silence, I believe God is inviting me to be transformed—to trust him in ways I never have before. God is inviting me in this season of life to move slowly into his kind generosity, generous guidance, and divine love—even when I can’t understand what is happening.

For example, over my lifetime, I have taught myself that I am able to meet the challenges that come my way. I still live with the expectation that God agrees with this perspective and will answer my prayers by helping me do what I want to do or what I think I should do. But in this season of aging, I find God is inviting me to pray with a different perspective, different expectations, and surprisingly different results.

But in this season of aging, I find God is inviting me to pray with a different perspective, different expectations, and surprisingly different results.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

As we age, God is inviting us into a new experience of transformation. This often leads to finding peace with all that is “unsolved” in our heart.

Hearing God’s Silent Voice

The Holy Spirit is reminding me that I can begin to experience transformation by listening more carefully to the silent manifestation of God’s love in nature all around me. God surprises me with snow that falls during the night when I am in bed, asleep, not busy helping him out. His invisible wind currents guide the geese down to our local lake. (If he can silently guide a bird to water, he can certainly guide me today.) The Bible tells us that the rising sun is a reminder each day that God’s love, mercies, and faithfulness are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22, 23, NRSV).  David writes in Psalm 19:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
Psalm 19:1-4 (NRSV)

Nature’s messages of God’s glory are silent, but they are vivid reminders of a foundational truth of transformation: God is God, and I am not. I absorb these images of God’s love, sometimes unconsciously. He is communicating truth to me in ways that I could not hear with words.

At other times, I find that God’s words in the Bible, though seemingly silent on the page, are how God speaks to me. As the Holy Spirit whispers to me through the words of Scripture, I am learning to listen closely to what I am hearing.

Visio Divina and Lectio Divina

Two spiritual practices that invite us to engage with God through both nature and words are Visio Divina and Lectio Divina.

Visio Divina helps us focus on the silence of God’s love in an image, while Lectio Divina invites us to focus on the message of God’s words in the Bible. As I get older, I am circling back to these ancient disciplines and experiencing them in new ways. These days I have simplified them in ways that fit the new, older me. Instead of doing four or five “steps” with each practice, I do two steps. I notice what might apply to my life today and then I sit and listen to God’s whispers. These two practices have become spiritual hearing aids to help me hear what God is saying in love.

Visio Divina is sometimes called “sacred seeing.” It is not limited to looking at nature. We can also look at a photo, a painting, a sculpture, or another work of art such as an icon or the Japanese art form of kintsugi. As we sit in silence, our own and God’s, we notice how the visual image expresses God’s love and grace. If it is a picture, we can imagine where Jesus might be in it, or what Jesus might say to us if we were walking with him in that scene. We can muse on how the piece of art reflects an invitation of God to us personally. Or we can choose not to think at all and just sit still, absorbing the beauty of what we are experiencing.

Lectio Divina, on the other hand, focuses on words, usually the words of Scripture. This way of reading Scripture reminds me that “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12, NRSV) and “a lamp to my feet” (Psalm 119:105, NRSV). The same Bible that was alive to me in my younger years and that has guided me into my adult years is still alive and still lighting my way. But this is happening a little differently.

The same Bible that was alive to me in my younger years and that has guided me into my adult years is still alive and still lighting my way. But this is happening a little differently.

In recent years, I have discovered that the simpler my approach is to Lectio, the more meaningful my experience is. I pick only one or two verses, usually in a translation that helps me look at God’s word through a different window than I had available to me in my youth. I listen for the whispers of the Holy Spirit as I read. I focus on how these words remind me of the transformation God is offering me in a current experience in my life. Through this ancient practice of Lectio, I am listening to the living word of God. I listen as carefully as I can to what God is saying to my soul today.

Continuing the Journey

In my ongoing journey of transformation, I am learning that transformation in our senior years may be less dramatic than I expect. When Elijah asked for God’s help, God did not answer with spectacular events, but with “sheer silence.” For me, in this season of life, God is answering my prayers in the silence of ordinary days.

Paul wrote to the Romans: “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life—and place it before God as an offering” (Romans 12:2, MSG). As I have gotten older, my sleeping has changed, my eating has changed, my work and my walking have changed. God’s invitation to all of us who are getting older every day is to offer our ever-changing lives to him to receive spiritual transformation. May God give us ears to hear his goodness and love as this happens.

Click here to engage in the practices of Lectio and Visio Divina.