“…the Spirit comes to help us in our weakness,
for, when we do not know how to pray properly,
then the spirit personally makes our petitions for us
in groans that cannot be put into words; and He
who can see into all hearts knows what the Spirit
means because the prayers the prayers that the
Spirit makes for God’s holy people are always
in accordance with the mind of God.”
--Romans 8: 26-27
The prayers of the Spirit are always in accordance with the mind of God… I’ve never really pondered what that means. What is the Spirit’s prayer? I guess, that is something I’ve usually glossed over when reading Romans. I think my focus has probably been on the beautiful assurance that even if I don’t know what to pray for, the Spirit does and will pray for me. And that has always seemed like enough for me. I took comfort in the fact that if I was thinking I needed a new bright red Schwinn bicycle with gears and hand brakes and a bell on it, perhaps the Spirit would know I would do better with a blue one. That was kind of how I thought this worked.
But after a Pandemic year and a Pipe-Freezing Snow-mageddon, I began to wonder, what’s going on here? Is it me or is it the Spirit? Somebody sure seems to be praying wrong. Because I sure wasn’t praying for a pipe-bursting freeze and a state-wide power outage and a week without running water. Maybe it was my wife! She had been wanting to go camping, so maybe God was answering her prayer—because that’s what we were doing. Camping in the living room, gathering snow and rain water to flush the toilets, melting bags of ice that a friend bought for us so we’d have drinking water. We were –at least for these city-folks—roughing it. Living the Little House on the Prairie dream, so to speak. Heck, we even made molasses candy in the snow, like Ma and Laura used to do! And so, yes—we might admit that there was something of a blessing in this weird break from our normal lives. We were a little quieter and a little more intentional for a few days. We were a little more dependent on each other and on our neighbors. And even in the evening as the world grew dark and the battery powered lanterns came on, we would sit listening to a battery powered radio and playing games by candle-light in the growing dark. And just when it was getting to be too much and our nerves were beginning to fray and the charm of roughing it was wearing thin, the power came back and stayed on. And we all cheered. It felt like a prayer had been answered. But then, the phone rang; it was my mother-in-law. She was in the ER. The doctors weren’t certain what was going on, but she seemed to have some internal bleeding. In the end, this was only the beginning. After more than a week in the hospital we learned she has cancer in her stomach and possibly other places, and according to the doctors, only months to live. It felt like a sucker punch. Like we’d been tricked into thinking everything was finally okay, getting back to normal, and suddenly—wham!
Is this what it means to be in accordance with the mind of God? As St. Teresa of Avila famously said: If this is how God treats His friends, no wonder He has so few…
And so, suddenly the world has stopped. And all the headlines and talk about freezes and pandemics and Ercot and elections and masks and ZOOM and re-openings, it all seems like so much nothing. Looking into the eyes of a person who knows she is dying, seeing that fear and confusion and that helplessness seem to grow in the quiet of her exhausted gaze… Suddenly everything seems to be put into perspective. And suddenly I want to cry out—but I don’t have any words.
And yet, according to Paul, that is exactly when the Spirit intercedes for us “in groans that cannot be put into words…”
Looking into my mother-in-law’s eyes, that is the prayer I see; that prayer that cannot be put into words.
In the book of Job, there is that wonderful, strange prayer of his; standing before his friends, Job turns to God and cries out, “Please just leave me alone long enough that I may swallow my spit!” (cf. 7:19). We all feel that way sometimes. The world, our life, our trials overwhelm us and all the prayer we have left in us is to cry out: Leave me alone! But if we offer even that to God, we can trust that the Holy Spirit will set it right in the translation.
For us, for the moment, all our prayers are for my wife’s mother. For a miracle, for healing, for comfort, for hope… that she won’t be afraid and that she will know she is loved, by her family, and by her Lord. And the rest we just have to leave to God.
But now, as I finish this, I think I might have an idea just exactly what it is the Spirit prays:
Our Father, who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day
our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil…
Amen
