For the ones who still whisper help

You can leave this book beside the bed for a while.

There is no need to begin it on a morning when you feel hopeful, or to finish a chapter because you have started one. Some books ask for a great deal of us. I would like this one to be possible to open when there is very little left.

It is for people who cannot pray, though even that description may be too certain. You might still say grace. You might speak the responses in a service, almost without thinking, and find yourself unable to say a single word when you are alone. Or you might have stopped using the word God and still sometimes catch yourself saying help.

I know something of that distance between the words a person can say and the words they can bear to mean.

Prayer was once part of the work of my life. I had language for it. I could speak when a room needed someone to speak. In time, the difficulty became more intimate than a question about whether any of those sentences were correct. I no longer knew whether I could live inside them.

What does a person do then?

The rest of life does not wait for an answer. Children need fetching. Work begins. Someone has used the last of the milk and returned the carton to the fridge, an act for which no satisfactory theology has yet been offered. You answer messages. You make something to eat. Underneath an ordinary day, a familiar part of your life has become strange.

I am writing from there.

The language of this book comes chiefly from a Christian life. Scripture, church, the names I learnt for God: these are part of my own history, and I will return to them because they still have a place in what I am trying to understand. I am not offering an account of every tradition of prayer. Other people have inherited other words, and those words deserve more than being gathered into a claim that we all mean the same thing underneath.

Even within the faith I know, the experiences differ. A familiar sentence may have sheltered you where it frightened me. A practice I put down may still be helping you live. We can speak about those differences without deciding in advance that one account must make the other untrue.

I hope the book can be read that way: as a conversation with a particular person, whose life may touch yours in some places and remain quite different in others.

There are things I believe firmly. People should be able to tell the truth about harm. Children should not have to earn affection through religious fluency. Love should make us more interested in the person before us, including when that person complicates what we would prefer to believe. Those convictions have consequences for the kind of prayer I can attempt.

They have not supplied an answer to every question about God.

Some questions will remain questions here. I am not leaving them open because uncertainty is fashionable or because a tentative voice sounds kinder. I am leaving them open because I do not know how to close them honestly. Where I have found something I can say with warmth, I will try to say it without apologising for the warmth. Where I have no answer, I will try not to make the absence sound more elegant than it felt.

The book has room for a less composed person than its best sentences might suggest.

He is the one who needs to be able to live in it.

There are different reasons a person might arrive. Grief can change the sound of a promise. Harm can make a once beloved room impossible to enter. Questions can become too serious to put away after a short conversation. Sometimes exhaustion gets there first. Sometimes nothing can be identified neatly enough to explain to the people asking what happened.

Your reason does not have to resemble mine.

Nor does your way forward. You may find your way into a church again. You may already be in one, reading these pages between services. You may be well outside any religious home, unsure whether the longing you carry has anything to do with God. I hope there is room here for that uncertainty to remain yours.

I still reach towards God. That will be evident in these pages. At times I will speak with the warmth of that reaching; at other times I will hardly know what to call it. My hope is not evidence I can place in your hands. It is something I can tell you about, honestly, and let you meet in your own way.

The prayers between the chapters are words offered for use. Their first person is a voice you can borrow; a morning or a bedside in a prayer need not be a record of a particular event in my life. They are not there to test whether you have understood the prose. Think of them as benches along a path. A place to stop. Some may say what you have been trying to say for years. Others may ask more than you can mean today.

Leave those words alone. Read the part you can mean.

You are also free to change them. A prayer in print can seem more certain of itself than it ought to be. The clean type, the space around it, the full stop at the end: all of that can lend authority to what began as somebody trying to speak. These began there too. If a line does not fit your mouth, you need not force it in.

There are people I love within this book. There are also parts of their lives that belong to them. I want to be careful about the difference between telling my story and making another person carry it for me. Where a memory has stayed incomplete, I would rather leave it incomplete than supply the detail that would make a better scene.

That is also how I want to approach God.

I have had enough of supplying the missing lines in a conversation and then calling the result an answer. Some of what follows will be a question left where it was asked. Some of it will be anger. There will be places where the most faithful thing I can write is that I do not know.

There will be other things too. A laugh arriving in a house where sorrow also lives. The warmth of a cup. The awkward tenderness of trying to pass something good to our children without passing on every fear we inherited. A patch of light that asks nothing of the person standing in it.

These things do not make the suffering disappear. I want them in the book because they are in the life.

I used to think that beginning again would require a large moment. Enough conviction to carry me over the distance. A clear account of what had happened and what it all meant. I am less sure of that now. A person can spend a long time waiting to feel ready for a conversation they have already begun, quietly, in the middle of everything else.

If there is a sentence in you, it can be a small one.

If there is no sentence, you can sit here for a while.

We have somewhere to begin.