Prayer is a listening to the creative, life-giving word that loves us into being. Yet prayer of a simple, contemplative kind, in which we try to stand before God and let him know us, not much preoccupied with particular thoughts but just loving, invariably produces a sense of our own sinfulness. . . . [Sometimes, our] sinfulness makes itself felt in a global sense of being weak and shabby and in need of God’s mercy, an awareness of the [miserable] situation within. This kind is not an act but a state, and it almost seems to help; or at least the experience of it is part of prayer. . . . Somehow it is good to be there, because it is real, and to avoid this confrontation would be to escape into untruth. The strange thing is that although prayer is often completely unsatisfying and very humbling, although you seem to fail and fail again in prayer, you dimly know that it is all-important to stay there in that emptiness, refusing to fill the void with anything that is not God.
If this is your experience, you have attained communion with the tax collector in the Gospel. He had no achievements and no claim; he could only pray from his chaos, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (cf. Luke 18:13). All he could do was to make a space for God to be merciful, for God to be God for him. You have to make a space for God to be God for you, so that he can draw you into that truth-relationship with himself. This means space in the practical sense: you need a measure of time and silence to let him do it. It also means space in the sense of personal emptiness, not clinging to any righteousness of your own, letting go of any kind of inner defense against the living God. Then just abide there under his judgment and let him love you. He is a God who delights to give himself where there is hunger and thirst of spirit.

Sr. Maria Boulding, The Coming of God

Maria Boulding (1929–2009) was a Benedictine nun of Stanbrook Abbey in England. She was a theologian, spiritual writer, and translator of the works of St. Augustine. She authored The Coming of God and edited A Touch of God.