It happened again. I don’t want to write the specifics down. Not out of decorum, but because the specifics aren’t actually the point, and dwelling on them is its own kind of temptation, a second helping of the first one. What I want to write down is what happened after, because that is the part I still don’t understand.
For two days I did not pray. Not a dramatic refusal. I didn’t decide anything; I just found every reason to be busy at the hour I usually stop. I know, intellectually, that this is backwards. The prayer is for exactly this. But knowing a thing and being able to do it turn out to be very far apart once shame is involved.
I keep thinking about Adam in the garden, after. God asks him where he is, not because God doesn’t know, but because Adam needs to hear himself say it. And Adam’s answer is not a confession. It is an explanation: I heard you, I was afraid, I was naked, I hid. He never says what he did. He describes his hiding instead. I know that instinct better than I’d like to. Hiding was the thing that felt most natural, and apparently it is the oldest instinct in the species, older than the excuse-making that came right after it.
What makes this hardest is not fear of punishment, exactly. It’s something closer to grief: that I did this again, in front of a God who is not holy in some decorative, ceremonial sense but actually, really other than the mess I keep making. Approaching him afterward does not feel like approaching a disappointed friend. It feels closer to walking toward a fire.
But David wrote the fifty-first psalm after Bathsheba, after Uriah, after the worst version of this failure a king could produce, and he did not stay outside the room. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. He did not ask for a clean heart and wait to bring it. He asked to be given one, which means he came still holding the broken one, before any of it was fixed.
I prayed tonight. Not well, not long. I didn’t manage eloquence, barely managed specificity. Just enough words to stop hiding in the trees. That’s the whole report. I don’t feel absolved in any emotionally satisfying way. I just feel like I came back into the garden instead of staying in the bushes, and I suspect that was what the prayer was actually for.