Prayer is a conversation with God, but I don’t hear any words. Isn’t that a problem?

It was for me. I spent 17 years in Catholic education, and prayer remained a mystery. I had a vague spiritual sense. I liked being Catholic. I loved poetry. But in the moment, closing my eyes, clasping my hands, I felt unnerved and unnatural. My thoughts spun, irrelevant and inappropriate. Then I’d judge my thoughts and spiral until I offered generic thanks, asked for help and moved on.

More often, I gave up.

Of course prayer was uncomfortable. I was born in 1996 and grew up into the digital world. I was a toddler on an iMac. My middle school mood was broadcast via AIM status. My cellphone has been within 20 feet of my person for nearly two decades.

I’ve never been alone. There was always a device, or a screen, or a song or a podcast. Those things existed as relief to internal discomfort: errant emotions, memories that summon themselves, regrets. What are you supposed to do with them when you have to get on with your day?

The cleverness of the contemporary internet is that it exploits the human desire to know, to have answers. When my brain flickers toward uncertainty—in thought, in feeling—I reach for my phone. My generation was the first that could look at a screen to escape any slight social discomfort. When you feel something uncomfortable, you go to the internet. That’s the answer.

Of course, worries about the effect of new technologies on young people predate the internet. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar said about television: “It is well-known what a seductive influence [it has] on young people, who, assaulted by a multitude of chaotic images flitting across the screen, are no longer capable of asking questions about the meaning of life.”

The internet is a machine that rids the world of mystery. We go to Instagram to find out how to look; TikTok for what to buy, where to eat; X for what we should talk about. For everything else, Google it. Every digital thing we’ve built serves the same end: Stop questioning.

So what do you do when you have a problem without an answer? Let’s say you’re 26, still financially dependent on your parents, and one day back in Pennsylvania your father dies in his bedroom. In the morning your mother finds him and screams, and you go. Then it’s two years later and the finances are figured out, and you’ve learned to pay your own way, and everyone has told you you’re a good son, and you look out the window and don’t know how you got here.

You mistake tree branches for cracks in reality. When you see people with their parents, you are angry. You are without control. You cannot speak honestly. Emotions well up inside you; there’s a maelstrom in your solar plexus. It cannot be resolved. Silently, worshiping an idol of anxiety, you go about the world. You are waiting for the next bad thing, which you are certain as sunrise will come.

This is where I found myself this past Lent when, at the end of everything, I resolved to pray. I had a problem without an answer, and I’d given up on the advice of others. I exhausted every alternative—S.S.R.I.s, alcohol, internet fame, James Joyce reading groups.

On Ash Wednesday, at a sparsely attended service in Brooklyn, I received my ashes and began again. For 40 days, I would pray.

How? First, I tried lists: Here’s what I’m grateful for, here’s what I’m struggling with; please help. This is a foundation. I took a step back and looked at my life, the swirl of challenge and goodness I navigated. I acknowledged I wasn’t alone.

But this can make prayer pretty shallow. “Hi God, thanks for my dog; think you could spare a job interview?” There isn’t much of the mystic in asking God for money.

So I cribbed some petitions: I prayed for the sick, the impoverished, the imprisoned, peace. I offered tiny meditations on the nature of our world, its violence, its injustice, my place in it. Again, this is good. But the loftiness of it—its philosophical nature, its impossibility—made me feel like a performer. It was inauthentic. It didn’t have heart.

“The heart is also the locus of sincerity,” Francis wrote in his final encyclical, “Dilexit Nos,” “where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the ‘secrets’ that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves.”

Could I come to prayer naked? As I am? The ego-heavy, the aggravated, the artistic, the philosophical, the Philadelphian, the feminine, the me? What was stopping me? That I felt unworthy. That prayer was something divine, rather than human.

If I had to pretend in front of God, wouldn’t I have to pretend everywhere? I surrendered. I gave up on praying correctly. I made the sign of the cross and spoke as myself, in my vernacular, in my tone. I pictured the friend that listens closest. I wandered and embellished, I welcomed God into the ugliness of my life.

What did I hear in response? Only the sound of cars braking at the red light on Flushing Avenue. I heard silence, and what silence is made of: airflow, tree leaves rustling, motors, bird chirps. When I pressed my fingers in my ears to find something quieter, there was the boom of my own bloodflow.

The answers to our prayers come in the changing circumstances of our lives: what happens to us, what doesn’t, what others tell us, what our heart commands. But these signals are varied and multifarious. Rarely does the stranger on the street stop you and say, “Stop applying to random openings you find on LinkedIn and utilize your college network.” Rarely does your heart tell you that either. We are meant to hear God’s answers in the wild environment of life, distinguish them from accident or coincidence, interpret them, and act on them. But how?

It’s hard. Modernity does not subdue hearts to the useful and the good. Worse, the signs I know—open blue skies, reversible octopus plushies, Diet Cokes—are just things to you. Deepening my spiritual life meant letting go of the idea that I would see the same world as everyone else. I let go of expecting others to understand. I accepted a private vocabulary, beyond the verbal. This vocabulary is composed of words in a language only the world can speak and only I can understand. I entered conversation with life.

To hear what the Holy Spirit is telling you, you have to get off your phone. Go outside. Act, act repeatedly, act imperfectly. Put yourself in conflict, be in the world. Go, go, go.

So maybe the question I had was wrong. I now know you cannot pray, you can only be a person who prays. This is a habitual action, its existence relies on its repetition. I learned to sit in silence.

Quieting your mind does not make you stupid, informationless. In fact, the opposite. A great therapist once offered me, “Why do you have to think all the time?” Thought is an action of the mind you wield toward an end. If you’re doing something else, shut it up. What you need to recognize, you’ll recognize. Knowing this is called faith.

People have asked me: What do you wish you did differently when your father was alive? I wish I wasn’t so afraid of being myself.

When it came to conversations with my father—he was a world-class rower; I was a thespian—I was trying to say things that I thought would provoke him to joy, or interest or laughter. Now I realize the point of a conversation is not to please the other party. The point of conversation is to express yourself, truthfully, humanly, within the bounds of society’s allowance, so that you do not walk through life wishing you had said something else.

I spent years walking through life wishing I had said something else. I lived in the past. Demented, I tested the speech of others and decided whether or not it pleased me. Was this person smart enough, or funny enough; did they understand me and what I said? As a result, I missed hearing anything people said to me. Even people I loved. People who loved me.

One day, you touch your parent’s cold calf and tell the dispatcher there’s no point in CPR. You know that he was trying to tell you something without words, but you didn’t know what. I am saying in each death is a message only you understand, in a language only you speak.

Prayer is a conversation. From the Latin conversatio—“a way of life,” or the Middle English conversacioun—“a place where one dwells.”

Prayer is a region. It’s between the material and the immaterial. It’s about the size of a leaf. It is populated with feelings and thoughts, and twitters of the heart, and light falling on surfaces and the grooves of your fingerprints meeting. It’s as real as your worst day. This is a dwelling place that follows you always, that is constant through time, that simply is.

It’s kind of like, well, the internet.

We can visit as foreigners, or users, or guests, or ghosts, or we can visit as ourselves. But the only way to know it is to go.

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Michael Quinn is a writer born in Philadelphia. His play “The River East” was shortlisted for the 2024 Yale Drama Series Prize. He is a graduate of Boston College.

This article appears in November 2025.

Michael Quinn is a writer born in Philadelphia. His play “The River East” was shortlisted for the 2024 Yale Drama Series Prize. He is a graduate of Boston College.