Desert crossing: searching for a spiritual oasis in the middle of a long dry spell.

I had nothing to say during the personal sharing time at a meeting of a Christian group I belong to. I listened as others talked about their prayer and faith-based actions, but I couldn't participate. I told the group that I was sorry, but was "in the desert," and prayer in general wasn't working for me. After the group sharing, another member came up to me and said, "I was in the desert for 11 years. It happens." Wow. It must be much more common than I thought.

For me it was a time in which my heart and soul were out of sync with God. I felt empty and distant from God. I sensed that all my prayers, whether silent or spoken, hit a brick wall about 3 feet from me or just instantly fizzled. Pray. Smack. Stop. My prayers didn't connect to God or anything real, and neither did my spiritual life in general. My desert experience was neither planned nor focused quite the opposite of the romanticized "Desert Fathers" who deliberately went to the desert for an intense time of spiritual searching.

You might expect a story like this to have a tidy, happy ending. This one doesn't. But I now have enough desert behind me to reflect on the experience with some relief. It took a major career disappointment; my wife, Sally's, tough and tender love; and a tornado over my house, literally, to jolt me onto a new journey.

What drove me into the desert in the first place? I blame, at least partially, the institution of the Catholic Church. The clergy sexual-abuse issue infuriated me. I personally knew several victims of clergy sexual abuse long before the Boston blowup in 2002. Each one felt mistreated and revictimized by legalistic and insensitive responses of church officials.

Over time I became disillusioned enough to start skipping weekend Masses with some regularity for the first time in my life. When leadership fails, many followers just fade away, and I was among them.

I felt better about my chosen absence after a more recent incident. There was a canonical dispute at my family's ancestral Polish parish, St. Stanislaus Kostka in St. Louis. The archbishop eventually excommunicated the pastor and trustees and warned the rest of us about the risk of mortal sin if we took Communion from that pastor. "Who cares?" we said. There was zero pastoral value in causing hundreds of innocent bystanders--octogenarians and their descendants like me--to feel stranded and distraught about the church's law-loving leaders.

But at the end of the day, I must not and do not blame others for my choices. I created my desert experience. I made choices, I chose to stop attending Mass, and I allowed my prayer life to fizzle.

I tried a few things to get out of the desert, mostly reading. I entered the self-help book movement and often would think I'd find the answer when reading secular authors who describe how to set aside our thoughts and become totally engaged in the present moment. I embraced their ideas but failed to move such concepts from my head to my heart. Spiritual writers Richard Rohr, Joyce Rupp, and Henri Nouwen tried to teach me that some kind of life-changing crash and personal brokenness are inevitable

and necessary, but we're taught in the Western world not to believe it. I should have.

My wife, Sally, used to mention with some regularity that I was disconnected from people. I would respond defensively that she was wrong. She tried to tell me how arrogant I sounded in my resistance. My retort was adolescent: I am who I am, and everybody should be OK with that. But now I know Sally was right. I would cancel appointments, skip meetings, and avoid social gatherings. The withdrawal contributed to my desert experience as I blamed other people or external factors for my feelings of separation, frustration, and dissatisfaction with life and the world. I always believed that the really great thing in my life would be the next thing, still out there somewhere, and so I kept searching. I was wrong again.

Looking back, I know my dominant emotion during my time in the spiritual desert was anger: anger at the church, anger at myself, anger at people who hurt me. I allowed anger to justify my opinions, my disconnections, and my all-too-frequent sarcasm, which became a barrier to intimacy.

Two mighty blows changed me forever after I had been in the desert for quite awhile. First was the career disappointment of not being considered for a promotion. Friends offered consolation, but the rejection tossed me into a new unstable place of wondering about my purpose in life. Rohr says we should pray for one good humiliation a day, and I surely had mine. Then the tornado came.

Just after nightfall on March 12, 2006, Sally and I saw on television that a major storm cell was roaring directly toward our city. We huddled in the basement. We lost all electric power. We heard crashes outside, pelting noises. Sally said later she thought we were going to die. Two tornadoes cut through our darkened city, including my neighborhood. An hour later, after the all-clear, we decided to go upstairs and see what we still had. Or didn't have.

What I didn't know at the time was that those 11 basement steps were my path out of the desert. The storm that cut holes in my neighborhood also pierced my soul in the weeks to come. I haven't been the same since, and for that, I am forever grateful. Sally and I got upstairs and entered a house that was still standing and structurally sound. We went to the front porch and in the darkness saw neighbors everywhere outside and flashlights flickering.

We examined the fallen trees, debris, and broken glass littering the street and yards. "We are lucky," we said calmly. We still had our house, and nobody was hurt. Our roof, siding, and fences needed total replacement, along with a few windows.

A few weekends later, after the initial cleanup, I was in the yard rebuilding a fence with my son, while four or five neighbors were on their rooftops restoring shingles and gutters and chimneys. The pounding and echoes of hammers, saws, and nail guns became a neighborhood symphony. An awesome sense that I was part of something much larger and much more powerful than myself would not go away. My insides felt different, more raw and yet more serene. The storm ripped something out of my heart--a piece of my ego.

For too long I had filled that space with my schedules, ambitions, and frustrations. That is the space where the tornado blasted a hole. It is also the space where God, the source of serenity, came to rest. I experienced what I had once read: There is a place deep within us reserved only for God.

It would be too linear, though, to tell you I'm out of the desert. I know I'm not, although I have discovered two small oases.

First, I am much more aware of the blessing of the present moment. I used to hate yardwork, for example. But this summer I spent more time than ever with my wife outside, weeding our flower beds and small tomato patch. When it was time to weed, removing one weed at a time became my only task. I learned to tell my mind to stop racing ahead to the "more important" things I would do later in the day. See that weed between the two carpets of snow plants? Pull it out, roots and all. Done. Now the next one. That is neither profound nor complicated, but I am different because of it.

My second oasis was the discovery of a new form of prayer--the silent repetition of a small phrase. I got the idea from a Henri Nouwen online reading group, though it wasn't original with him, either. "Jesus, are you here? Teach me!" has become my personal mantra. I made it up. I had felt so distant from God for so long. Now I find that repeating the prayerful phrase silently two to six times at any time, especially while feeling anger arising, changes me. I feel God's presence. I feel comforted. The prayer attacks the anger and softens my heart. When I pray "Teach me," and then ask: Teach me what? I realize that I can wait for the answer and just stay in the present moment.

I am learning, as Rohr and Nouwen explain it, that my only role today is to say yes to the truth that God is in me and God loves me. When I do that, I don't need solutions to life's big mysteries. I can shrug at the chaos around me and the world's unfairness.

For years I had thought about writing my own book about the purpose of life. I wanted to write, as I did in speeches a decade ago, that life is hard, life is fragile, and life is a mystery. I suppose I didn't write the book because my heart didn't get it yet. I hope I'm never arrogant enough again to conclude that I do get it. Too many questions remain.

I feel wonderful that my most confident answer to most big questions is: "I don't know. I just don't know." I think the book I wanted to write is actually the life I want to live.

By ED WOJCICKI, a university administrator from Springfield, Illinois.