Sighs too deep for words
Sighs too deep for words
On Prayer: Part 2, in which we allow our prayer to be completed for us
"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us
with sighs too deep for words."
Romans 8:26
As Simon Tugwell observes in The Way to Pray, we have no natural right to pray.
In the Old Testament, God authorizes priests and prophets to pray. In the New Testament, the situation changes but the underlying rules still hold. People are baptized into Christ, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments, our hearts and lips are opened in prayer. All who are in Christ may now pray.
What this means, as Tugwell observes, is that prayer is a privilege not a right. It is both a gift and a duty. What should follow from this shift in perspective is the realization that we cannot rely on ourselves alone for prayer.
We meet prayer halfway by following patterns and forms.
We dispose ourselves to prayer with an open heart.
We practice prayer through spiritual exercises.
We listen for God’s words in His scripture and in His Church.
We sit in the silent majesty of the Lord and await His call.
However, none of these things is a complete prayer.
Even the simplest utterance of the Jesus Prayer or the Sign of the Cross is a way for us to find the ground upon which prayer can occur, but the rest is up to the movement of the Spirit.
Just as the efficacy of works can only function through the action of grace, so can the power of prayer only work through the action of the Spirit. Our prayer needs to be completed for us.
Does the Mass, the highest and most perfect prayer of which man is capable, function through our own powers? Are we not merely collaborators with the Priest and the people of God in the greater Work of Christ in the Mass? Is the Mass ours, or Christ’s?
What’s true of the Mass is true of personal prayer. We are not the only power driving our prayer.
It’s a mistake to think that the action of God in prayer is limited to His response. In fact, half of prayer itself is the action of God, before we even get to the response. We would not even have the desire to pray without grace. Our will and intellect cooperate with grace. We can ignore grace or we can build on grace, but we can neither create it nor demand it.
The intimacy with God that we seek in prayer is a gift on top of another gift. The prayer itself was the first gift, because as St. Paul says, "we do not know how to pray as we ought."
What's the result? That "the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."
Sighs too deep for words. That's the prayer that comes from the prompting of the Holy Spirit. God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the still small voice. Words may open the path for us, or dispose us to the action of grace, but in the end, the prayer of the Spirit lies beyond words. It's merely a sigh: the sigh of the lover, answered by the beloved.
Perhaps that delicate quality is why few people are ever really satisfied with the way they pray: it’s hard to apprehend. There's a feeling that it should be "more" or "better”: a sense that we're not doing it quite right.
Getting past the idea of right or wrong is difficult. There are as many types of prayer as there are pray-ers. It's as diverse as love. It's a simple as contemplating the wonder of a falling leaf, or as mystically shattering as the transverberation of St. Teresa.
Maybe we could come at a better understanding of prayer by what it is not. It's not a monologue: it's not talking to yourself.
Even an actor giving a monologue on a stage is not talking to himself. He's talking to an audience that has made a conscious choice to be there and listen to those words. Their emotional and mental response to that actor's monologue is their reply. Even if the actor is alone, he's not just talking into nothingness: he's conversing with himself, his peers, his audience, his predecessors, and the author through intellect, will, memory, and imagination.
No one prays alone
Communication is not a solitary activity: it's very nature assumes an I and a Thou. The "Thou" may be right in front of you with ears to hear, a thousand years away in time, a million miles away in space, or beyond the material world entirely, but this "Thou" exists, and thus there are two in the conversation.
We may be fine with the idea that we initiate a conversation with God and He listens, but does not reply directly (unless we are gifted with a mystical experience).
Let's turn that completely around. In fact, we're not the initiator of the conversation in prayer: God has spoken, and we are responding. Our prayer is not mere homage to the King, or a litany of things we need, or declarations of love or gratitude. These are, to be sure, part of prayer, but they are not its essence.
Its essence is our response to a conversation initiated by the Triune God. We cannot even be drawn to prayer unless prompted by grace, so an action has already occurred in the soul. The dialog is begun by God before we even open our mouths, minds, or hearts.
And more than grace is involved in this conversation. The very nature of each soul is such that it yearns to answer the call of its Creator. That same Creator has etched His message in every cloud and stone, every heart that beats and every touch of love. He gave us sacraments as channels of grace, and art as the expression of His glory; the word of the scripture, and the incarnate Word.
The entire world sings out with the conversation of God, and we think we're the ones initiating a one-sided conversation? Pure hubris.
God talks to us every day. The practice of silence and contemplation is the way we hear Him.
Prayer is the way we reply.