I pray most of the day, every day, though you would never see me doing it.
There’s no ritual to it, no set posture or specific hour. I pray in my thoughts — while I’m working, while I’m walking, while I’m waiting for water to boil. I ask for strength. I ask for endurance, especially now, at eighty-one, knowing my years are numbered and my energy and concentration aren’t what they once were. I ask for wisdom, creativity, health, and — more often than I probably should admit — a blessing on The Encore Project, as though God has nothing better to do than review my business plan.
I was taught, as a child, a very simple version of faith: ask, and you shall receive. Most of us are taught some version of this transaction. If you pray correctly, sincerely, faithfully enough, you get the outcome you asked for. It’s a tidy theology, and it works fine right up until the day it doesn’t — until the prayer that matters most goes unanswered, and you’re left holding a contract God apparently never signed.
I want to tell you what I’ve made of that moment, because I think most men eventually face it, and what they do next determines a great deal about the rest of their spiritual life.
The Two Roads Men Take
As I see it, when a man’s transactional faith fails him — when the prayer isn’t answered the way the simple version promised it would be — he tends to go one of two directions.
The first is to abandon the whole enterprise. If God doesn’t hold up His end of the bargain, why keep praying? This is a reasonable response, and I don’t judge it. I understand the logic.
The second is to keep practicing the same childish transaction anyway, just louder and more anxiously, hoping that more fervor will eventually produce the result the first attempt didn’t. This, I’ve come to believe, is its own kind of trap — not because the prayer is wrong, but because the framework underneath it never matured.
There’s research that speaks to this more directly than I expected to find. Geriatric researchers studying religious coping in older adults frame the whole question through what psychologists call integrity versus despair — the idea that late life eventually forces a reckoning with whether your accumulated experience, including its disappointments, adds up to something coherent or feels instead like proof that nothing makes sense. And in a finding I found genuinely validating, researchers have observed that people who waver in their beliefs — neither fully committing nor fully rejecting — tend to carry the highest levels of psychological distress. It isn’t faith or doubt that wears a person down. It’s living suspended between the two, refusing to let the question settle.
I don’t think I’ve fully resolved my own version of this question. But I’ve stopped wavering. I’ve landed somewhere, even if that somewhere includes real uncertainty.
It isn’t faith or doubt that wears a person down. It’s living suspended between the two, refusing to let the question settle.
What I Do With “No”
I don’t like it when God says no. I’ll say that plainly, because I think most men of faith feel this and few admit it.
But I’ve come to believe that “no” usually isn’t really the whole answer — it’s just the part I’m capable of hearing in the moment. When a prayer goes unanswered the way I’d hoped, my instinct used to be disappointment, sometimes resentment. What I try to do now is something different: I try to recall the other times in my life when I was certain something had failed completely, only to watch an idea or an opportunity emerge later that turned out to be better than anything I’d originally asked for. I couldn’t see that at the time. I only ever see it looking backward.
This is not wishful thinking, as far as I can tell. It’s closer to what researchers call positive religious coping — interpreting hardship through a frame of ultimate meaning rather than abandonment, and studies consistently link that interpretive habit to better outcomes in older adults facing real adversity, including illness and loss. I am not claiming a miracle cure. I am describing a discipline: the discipline of being a better listener, because I believe there is a bigger, broader consciousness at work than the one inside my own head, and that consciousness is not obligated to answer me on my schedule, in my preferred format, with the specific outcome I had in mind.
None of us will know, in this lifetime, what is certain and what is not. I’ve made a kind of peace with that uncertainty. Not because I’ve resolved it, but because I’ve decided it doesn’t have to be resolved for my faith to hold.
Why Mary
If you want to understand the architecture of my faith, you have to understand my devotion to Mary, because she is where I go first, before anywhere else.
I pray the Hail Mary frequently. She is my go-to source of hope and inspiration, more reliably than any other prayer I know. Part of this is theological — we believe in the Assumption, that she was taken up body and soul, that she occupies a singular place in salvation history. But the deeper part, the part that actually moves me, is simpler than doctrine: she was fully human, just as I am, just as you are. She is not only a mother. She is, in the truest sense available to us, the mother. That shared humanity is the thread that connects us, across two thousand years, in a way I find genuinely comforting rather than abstract.
Something happened to me on a retreat in college — a profound, private moment I’ve shared with only my wife in fifty-five years of marriage — and from that point forward, Mary became the place I go when I need hope. I won’t describe it further. Some things are not meant for an article. But I want you to know that my devotion isn’t generic piety. It came from somewhere real, somewhere I still think about, somewhere that still moves me when I let myself remember it.
What a Good Life Has Taught Me
I want to be honest about something else: I live a good life, and I know it.
I am in a loving relationship that has lasted fifty-five years of marriage. I live in a safe community — no bombs falling on my neighborhood, no genuine threat to my family’s security. These are not small things, and I don’t take them for granted. I think part of why I don’t let my doubts test my faith the way doubt seems to test some men’s is that my life has given me very little reason to feel abandoned. I recognize that this is, in some sense, a kind of grace I didn’t earn.
I don’t say this to suggest my faith is easy, or that I’ve never wrestled with God. I say it because I think honesty requires acknowledging the difference between a faith forged in genuine hardship and a faith sustained by a life that has, on balance, been kind to me. Mine is closer to the second — even as my energy and concentration aren’t what they once were. I’m grateful for that, and I try not to mistake gratitude for certainty.
I try not to mistake gratitude for certainty.
To the Man Who Has Stopped Asking
If you’ve given up on praying — if you decided somewhere along the way that God wasn’t listening, or didn’t care, or had already proven through some specific disappointment that asking doesn’t work — I want to say something to you directly.
I don’t think you stopped believing God exists. I think you decided He wasn’t answering, and you got tired of asking into silence. That’s a reasonable thing to feel. I understand it.
But here’s what I’d ask you to consider: the shift I’m describing in my own life isn’t really about believing harder. It’s about changing what you’re listening for. You’re not waiting for a clean yes or a clean no anymore. You’re waiting to notice, sometimes weeks or months later, that the thing you were so sure had failed turned out to be the foundation for something you couldn’t have asked for, because you didn’t yet know it was possible. This is the discipline of being a better listener applied to the spiritual life, not just the entrepreneurial one.
That’s not proof that God exists, or that prayer works in some mechanical, vending-machine sense where the right words guarantee the right outcome. It’s something more modest, and I think more truthful: a practiced willingness to keep being surprised. To keep asking, not because you’re certain you’ll get what you want, but because you’ve decided the asking itself is part of staying in relationship with whatever is larger than you.
I am eighty-one years old. I still ask every day. I still don’t always get what I ask for. And I still believe, more often than not, that I am heard.
That belief is available to you too, whenever you’re ready to ask again.
