The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany

by Doris Grumbach

The author describes the epiphany she experienced at age twenty-seven and her efforts to regain the experience through church and prayer

Genres: Spirituality, Religion, Prayer, Nonfiction, Christianity

126 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Doris Grumbach is an American novelist, biographer, literary critic, and essayist. She taught at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, and was literary editor of the The New Republic for several years. Since 1985, she has had a bookstore, Wayward Books, in Sargentville, Maine, that she operates with her partner, Sybil Pike.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Too often now I find the business of church keeps me from the real enterprise of prayer.” This book of theological introspection was published when Grumbach was 80. At that point, she was looking back at a distance of over 50 years on a mystical experience she had as a young wife and mother. Sitting on the porch steps at her home, momentarily alone, she felt the presence of God in an undeniable way. In the interim decades, she sought to recreate her experience through Psalms, liturgy and contemplative prayer. Yet organized religion was more often a stumbling block than a help, while an episode of shingles suggested to her that God might be more reliably found in suffering.

Grumbach’s gurus on her quest were Kathleen Norris, Thomas Merton, Dag Hammerskjöld, and especially Simone Weil. She quotes from all of them liberally. Her format is perhaps modeled after Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: chapters of a few pages each, not particularly organized by theme. The attempt to understand a personal epiphany is a theme shared with Living with a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich. Like Ehrenreich, Grumbach found that “my lifelong reliance on the value of knowledge did not serve me in my search for God.” Mystical experiences are notoriously difficult to write about, and I felt something of the same frustration reading this book that I did with Ehrenreich’s. All the same, this one is short and thoughtful, and will point you to much worthwhile reading.

[Brian Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grumbach is an excellent writer, and both books I've read from her, The Presence of Absence and 50 Days in Solitude, I found to speak to her, and our, search for meaning and fulfillment within ourselves in relation to the Sacred and, hence, our knowing some degree of regular silence with solitude is essential to this discovery, or re-discovery, for some of us, if not all of us.

This work, written prior to 50 Days..., provides a self-disclosure of Grumbach's struggle to reclaim an experience of the Divine she had in her early 20s. She entered the church, sometime after that epiphany, and later left it. She found the public rituals and prayers of the church did not facilitate her connection with the Sacred, though she tried to connect with her God in that setting many years.

Grumbach went on a private search for the Divine. She shares struggles over this leaving the public faith domain and going it alone, at times feeling guilt over this, questioning if she were being selfish, and wondering, as many would say, that this faith journey was a communal experience and one of service to others.

When Grumbach had her early epiphany, she had no faith of a religious nature, never had any trust there was a God, was a Marxist. Nothing had prepared her immediately to know this was God, though she admits the term "God" is not sufficient and misleading.

Her search to rediscover that intimate experience with her sense of God lasted decades. She found peace, at least a ceasing of the search, in the idea, found in many spiritual traditions, that the Divine is most known not in what we know but what we cannot know of this Mystery.

Also, Grumbach learned to know absence is the means of that sense of Presence she had known in her early 20s and, so, she could relax in knowing the powerful re-encounter might never happen. Grumbach details how writers like Thomas Merton and Simone Weal became guides on this discovery of Presence in absence.

For anyone who trusts in Something more than us, call this what he or she will, but struggles to realize it as a real presence, though possibly having known such before, this book can provide inspiration and guidance. Also, this opus can challenge persons who, like Grumbach had, have concluded the impossibility of that Something.

Grumbach had been ill-prepared for the early experience of the Sacred and the search this led her into. We can learn from her willingness to find her own way, while receiving guidance from others who had traveled the path of divine Wisdom before her, and us, as well as contemporaries who are, as in Grumbach's case, lights on the Way.

[Phillip Block · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a book about God, and one woman’s fifty-year-long quest to connect with him. After experiencing an epiphany early in life, where she felt the direct presence of God, the author sought to understand this experience and reconnect with God, primarily through prayer, during the remainder of her life. She sometimes sought connection through participation in the liturgical practices of a mainline religious tradition, but never found the fulfillment that she yearned for. This led her to, more often than not, exercise her faith on her own outside the walls of institutional churches.

Seeking to draw upon the wisdom of the ages, Doris Grumbach also quotes many of the saints of her religious tradition and other historical figures who suggested ways to personally experience God. One of those quoted was the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a young British monk writing in the 14th century. After consolidating and evaluating the advice of numerous sources, Grumbach simply accepts the truth that direct human connection with an elusive God is difficult and probably impossible. As humans, we are unfortunately stuck with living our lives in a perpetual state of Unknowing.

[Mary Burbidge · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are interested in prayer - how to do it, when to do it, why one might want to do it - you might be interested in the book. Also, if you would like to read what a bunch of religious experts have had to say about prayer. These include Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, Simone Weil, Julian of Norwich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing among others.

In this book, Doris Grumbach tells her story of trying to find God - a God she experienced unexpectedly and profoundly in her twenties - by isolating herself from the world and praying by herself.
Doris wears irritatingly big blinkers and has a penchant for asking advice and then not believing it or not following it or just deciding that it is not for her. You will want to slap her. Nevertheless, one must have respect for her commitment to her goal.

Why read this book? Because it will make you think about your own spiritual journey, your own understanding and maybe practice of prayer, and your own beliefs about God. Also because you will get a taste of the aforementioned experts. Because I read this book, I will also read the Naylor Sonnets by Kenneth Boulding and something by Simone Weil. Maybe that's a good enough reason?

[Anita]

I can recommend this book to one who is going through a process of seeking more of an experience with God. By that, I mean a felt experience, especially if they have had a profound past experience that has left them wanting to repeat the experience or find more. This book does not give answers, but is a slow-moving set of notes telling part of the author's seeking and struggling. A big part of her question is whether her seeking needs to be a solitary journey or one in a community such as a church. Much of what she writes is during a time when she is also in a lot of non-ending physical pain. I often saw where I had been in her shoes and there is something beneficial about reading how another person walked through it, and it would seem continues to walk it as do I.

[Rick Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less a guide to the spiritual life in terms of how to, Doris Grumbach offers a raw, honest account of the life of prayer and the experience of absence without any resolution other than persistence on the journey.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grumbach writes so honestly about faith and doubt. Wow.

[John Kaufmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected much more -- both because of the author and because of the topic.

[Mary]

I can't rate this book because I am not sure I understood it. Grumbach looks for a renewal of an experience she had as a young mother when she felt she had an encounter with God. She was not a believer at the time and wondered what to call the encounter--Name, Illumination, It. She seeks God through liturgy in the church but that does not work for her. She seeks God through contemplative prayer and through trying to empty herself. She at least finds some measure of peace.

She quotes Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk which I should reread for maybe the third time. Norris finds God in the community of a monastery and a church--in liturgy and the psalms. This is not Grumbach's way. She has more affinity with Merton who needs his hermitage or the monk of long ago who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing.

The last words of the book are a quote from the Talmud: "You are not expected to complete the task. Neither are you permitted to lay it down."

[Darleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those "spiritual reading" books that I found compelling while I was reading it, but can remember only a few concrete features of the book, and these concrete features aren't what made it compelling. Grumbach had an intense experience of the presence of God 30 years ago or more, and the memory of that experience keeps her searching for God. The book weaves in and out of autobiography/memoir to include comments about books she has read. And the final 20 pages or so are snippets of notes/quotes she's taken down over the years and didn't know what to do with. So they are just here one after the other without any relationship to each other. But as a book of spiritual reflections it works. I just really wish she had added footnotes/clear references for all the quotes she uses!

[Pam Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those spiritually walk on the wild side of life books but with a difference, how one woman's experience of the presence of God and a over whelming peace so intense it is difficult to comprehend but it is there and the she loses it again and sets off on a deeply profound journey to find it again using prayers and spiritual guidance. Deeply enchanting books.,

[Lisa Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has taken me a long time to read this book. Like very rich food, it has to be digested in small bites. More and more, I feel myself retreating from the world and seeking peace, solitude, and, yes, I suppose God or a sense of him. Excellent academic read with many diverse points of view about prayer, community and solitude.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trite. She seems bitter and unyielding in her quest for knowing the Presence, unyielding in that she has a distinct view of what she expects to find and an endless lament that she doesn't find it just so.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who gets a lot out of corporate worship, it was fascinating to hear Grumbach's concerns about worshiping in community. I am at the very beginnings of my private prayer life and I am learning all the time. This book was a real blessing and I expect to read it again.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

couldn't get into it. Heard author interviewed and thought she'd have something to say to me about meditation