Helplessness, Prayer, and Renewal: Nehemiah’s Guide

In undertaking to live an authentically Christian life today, we often feel helpless. Many obstacles stand between us and renewal—whether that is renewal in our own lives, in our families’ lives, or in the lives of our communities. 

Helplessness is a nearly constant theme throughout Scripture. What Moses says to the children of Israel can also be said to each of us:

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is because the Lord loves you, and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers. (Deuteronomy 7:7–8)

God does not choose people who turn out to be small and weak. Rather, He deliberately chooses the small and the weak “to shame the strong” (see 1 Corinthians 1:26–31). While knowing this may occasionally be consoling, the fact alone does not dispel the difficulties associated with weakness (cf. Hebrews 4:15–16; 5:7–9).

While some approaches to the problem of helplessness in Christian life can be fruitful, most proposed solutions ring hollow or superficial. They generally seem to suggest that if we really trust God, things will get easier. In a certain sense, this is true, but St. Paul was speaking programmatically when he taught his disciples that “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22; cf. 2 Corinthians 11:16–12:10).

The Bible suggests that things will often get harder for the one who trusts God precisely because he trusts. Trust, in other words, will often make us more helpless, not less. 

A biblical model for dealing with helplessness, then, is in order. The Prophet Nehemiah, active in the mid-fifth century B.C., provides one.

Nehemiah could hardly have been more helpless. He had received a divine vocation to rebuild the city wall of Jerusalem, which had been broken down (Nehemiah 1:1–11). 

The problem was, of course, that Israel was no longer an independent nation but subservient to the Persian emperor Artaxerxes. Furthermore, this same emperor had intervened to prevent the rebuilding of the same wall not long before Nehemiah’s time (see Ezra 4:17–23).

Nehemiah was Artaxerxes’s “cupbearer” (Nehemiah 1:11). This was, on the one hand, a position of significant power; the royal cupbearer tasted the king’s wine to prevent him being poisoned by his enemies. He was, therefore, one of the most trusted men in the realm. 

But Nehemiah’s request—to rebuild the city of Jerusalem—was not only to undo a recent royal decree but also to exercise a role proper to the king himself. City-building was understood, in Nehemiah’s time, as a royal prerogative (cf. Nehemiah 6:6–7). 

Artaxerxes could easily have seen his request as presumptuous or even disloyal. Awareness of this may have motivated Nehemiah’s fear in Artaxerxes’ presence (see Nehemiah 2:2).

Albeit Nehemiah was in a uniquely advantageous position, he was being called to take an extraordinary risk. The example of Esther comes to mind as similar. Both of these biblical heroes found themselves in apparently high positions, but God’s call revealed the powerlessness of even their exalted stations before the unaccountable power of the emperor. 

In the end, they were as helpless as anyone. Both had a choice between heroic obedience to God’s will or abandoning their people in their hour of need.

To prepare himself, Nehemiah prays with fasting (Nehemiah 1:4–11), then he approaches the king with his request (2:1). For our purposes here, what matters is not his first prayer—which is worth its own treatment—but his second prayer, offered in the midst of making his request:

The king said to me, “Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing else but sadness of the heart.” Then I was very much afraid. I said to the king, “Let the king live for ever! Why should not my face be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres, lies waste, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” Then the king said to me, “For what do you make request?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. (Nehemiah 2:2–4)

The Lithuanian rabbi Zadok HaKohen asked the question why Nehemiah’s second prayer was not recorded. He answers that Nehemiah’s request itself was his prayer (see Nehemiah 2:5): “Nehemiah…prays to God and then speaks to the King. Even though we do not find any specific prayers, we understand that the intention of his conversation was towards a prayer to God.”

In other words, Nehemiah’s request to the king was part of his prayer that God will move the king to grant Nehemiah’s request. He prayed even as he spoke.

Rabbi Yosef Rabinowitz comments further:

While beseeching the mortal king, [Nehemiah’s] attention turned towards the King of the Universe…. This is seemingly inconsistent with the level of intense concentration required during prayer. Moreover, it seems at variance with the sense of complete involvement conveyed by David in describing his own prayer, “and I am prayer” (Psalm 109:4 [literal trans. from Hebrew])—I am so consumed by my supplication that the prayer and I become a single entity.

Rabinowitz suggests, however, that rather than being at variance with the kind of devotion David exhibited in the psalm, Nehemiah’s apparently “casual” prayer was the mark of his profound holiness. His prayer did not contradict the Davidic model but rather illustrated it:

His statements to the Persian king involved mere lip service, while the full force of his attention was directed heavenward…. One should love [God] with an immense, surpassing, exceedingly powerful passion, so that the soul is entwined with the love of [God], and is always preoccupied with it, like a lovesick person who is unable to turn his mind from the object of his ardor. A tzaddik [Hebrew, “righteous man”] is so captivated by the love of God that he attends to mundane matters almost casually, preoccupied, as he is, with far more exalted interests.

As a result of his consuming love for God, God was always before Nehemiah’s eyes. According to Rabinowitz, “His commonplace activity was transformed into spiritual experience; for him, therefore, nothing was secular. In his character, the mundane and the sacred converged as a single whole.” This is the kind of prayer that “moves mountains”—faith working through love (cf. Matthew 17:14–20; 1 Corinthians 13:2).

Christians will recognize a profound correspondence between the teaching of these rabbis and the teaching of such spiritual writers as St. Benedict, St. Josemaria Escrivá, and Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. 

Prayer is not supposed to be part of our lives; prayer is supposed to be our lives. The universal call to holiness articulated at the Second Vatican Council exhorts each Christian disciple to embody David’s prophetic word: “I am prayer” (Psalm 109:4). Prayer is not supposed to be part of our lives; prayer is supposed to be our lives. Tweet This

The experience of helplessness often causes us to despair, or to lash out, at the forces outside ourselves that have apparently caused our helplessness. The way of the saints—which Nehemiah exemplifies—is not to look outward but inward. 

Helplessness, understood this way, is a call to deeper conversion. As Bl. Columba Marmion so memorably put it, our “miseries” are our title to God’s mercy.

The experience of helplessness or “misery” thus functions as a kind of examination of conscience, asking us whether our prayer is truly like that of Nehemiah. Is it merely part of our life, or does it truly consume us? 

In the same experience, we are offered God’s grace to face our helplessness squarely as part of our prayer. If we cannot yet say, “I am prayer,” we can learn to do so in our helplessness.

We must not, then, flee from such moments but lean into them. They are our spiritual “gym” par excellence, where we are molded into maturity in the divine Image, who became helpless upon the Cross to save us.

[Image: Nehemiah supervising the rebuilding of Jerusalem, etching, 1791]