Our daily bread and the prayer of the Spirit--More thoughts on Romans 8:26

 “…the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us

in groans that cannot be put into words…”

--Romans 8:26b

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Spirit praying for us, and in my contemplation my thoughts keep turning back to that prayer that the Lord, Himself teaches us:

 Thy will be done,

They kingdom come…

Give us this day, our daily bread…

Deliver us from evil…

 I figure that if this is what Jesus, Himself tells us to pray, then that is probably what the Spirit is praying for us.  While I am busily pleading with God for health and success and the phone number of a trustworthy plumber, the Spirit is petitioning that God’s will be done, and God’s kingdom will come…

 And that one particular phrase, “our daily bread” has stood out to me. Being a bread baker, and biscuit maker, I have my own particular tendency when I hear that phrase—and it leans toward melting butter, crackly golden crust, and orange marmalade (or grilled cheese).  But, as I prayed over this scripture recently, I find myself returning again and again to a different idea about my “daily bread.”  What if our daily bread, refers not just to food for our stomach.  What if it refers to food for our souls as well?

And again, this idea comes straight from the lips of Jesus. In John’s Gospel there is that story about the Samaritan woman at the well.  Toward the end of that story the disciples return with food and urge Jesus to have something to eat, but instead of asking if the waffle fries are still warm, the Lord says to them:

 “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me…” (John 4:34)

and that phrase keeps coming into my prayer—though now (for some reason) I am also thinking about waffle fries. Extra crispy… and a chocolate shake…

But, back to the point.  What does it mean to my prayer life to know that when Jesus speaks of daily bread, He might mean something other than sourdough or pumpernickel. He might be speaking of the sustenance and nourishment that come from doing God’s will.  And so, I am wondering if my daily bread might be God’s will; my daily bread might be the gift of a chance to do God’s will; to lean into a difficult moment and say: Not my will, but Thy will be done…

 The food of doing God’s will is food for my soul, food for the journey, food to sustain me in my time in the desert.  And thinking about this I am reminded of the story we hear at the beginning of each Lent, the story of Jesus fasting in the desert.  Immediately after He is baptized, He goes out into the desert and fasts for 40 days.  During this time, Satan comes to Jesus and tempts Him with promises of good things: food, security, success… and each time, Jesus responds: Not my will, but God’s will be done. 

On the surface, this seems to be simply a story of Jesus turning away from temptation and showing great restraint or will-power or even that He is clever-er than Satan.  But, what if this is really a story demonstrating how Jesus was fed during His time of fasting. The food He was nourished with was doing the will of the one who sent Him. 

To do God’s will, to walk with God, completely, and in complete harmony with God’s will is to dwell in the Kingdom of God’s Holy Presence. His Spirit… Is there anything more that the Spirit could want for us?

 And so I keep praying: Give us this day, our daily bread… And in groans that I cannot put into words, and cannot find on any fast-food menu, what I really mean is: Thy will be done, Thy kingdom come…

 At least, that’s what I want to be praying for, even if I can’t put it into words.

 

Prayer and the Spirit--some thoughts on Romans 8

“…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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cast your burden on the Lord --some thoughts on travel and prayer

“Cast your burden on the Lord

and He will sustain you…”

--Psalm 55:23

This summer, I went to visit my Dad and his wife for a few days. I don’t travel much, so for me this was a bit of a challenge –just getting on a plane and going somewhere. It makes me uncomfortable to be in a strange place.  I like to imagine that somehow this discomfort might be linked to my writing—to my imaginary life and imaginary travels.  I excuse my homebody nature by with the idea that I’m too busy travelling in my imagination to think about travelling in the real world.  And I think there is some sense to that.  But, I also think I’m a little bit afraid of letting go of control.  If I go somewhere else, I won’t have control of the environment, I won’t know my way around, I won’t know which way to go or who to ask for help, I won’t even have control over the ac or the gas station bathroom…  I will, like Blanche Dubois, have to depend “on the kindness of strangers.”

But all in all it wasn’t bad.  Seeing my dad and his wife was wonderful. They were so kind and welcoming, made me tomato sandwiches straight from their garden and gave me all the chips I could eat and all the coffee I could drink!  The very picture of perfection when it comes to being a host, and family.  I had a wonderful time with them. Sitting on the porch, enjoying my dad’s beautiful black-eyed-susans and towering sunflowers and watching the small yellow headed birds pop in and out of the bright yellow blossoms. It was a taste of heaven.  I also had the pleasure of hearing my father’s stories of his childhood, selling popcorn at the wrestling matches, and delivering groceries, selling Bibles door to door to pay for school.  All his adventures and misadventures. What a blessing to have that time we spent together on his porch, sipping our coffee and chatting, or just sitting in silence as the sun settled and the geese at the lake by the church across the road honked their evening prayers.  Truly a blessed time.

Something else interesting happened on this trip; and I would like to meditate on it for a moment. As I was packing to go, I had a sudden anxious sense that I shouldn’t bring my special Bible with me—just in case. I wouldn’t want to lose it on the plane or accidentally leave it at Dad’s.  So, I unpacked it from my bag and threw in one of my miniature New Testaments with Psalms. In my Bible reading I had just started Proverbs, and one of my little paperbacks has Proverbs in it, and I thought I was grabbing that one. When I sat on the porch that first morning at my Dad’s to do my morning prayer: read some scripture and write a little bit, I found that I had grabbed the wrong one.  I was disappointed.  I like my routines.  They give me comfort.   But, I would have to make do. So, I opened to one of the psalms and settled (quite by accident) on:

“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you.”

And it seemed good enough. I read over the whole psalm a couple of times, wrote a few notes in my journal and went back to my coffee and the birds and the flowers. Feeling sustained.

But then, on the way home things changed.  My trip went from ideal to my perfect travel nightmare.  At the airport I forgot to take my Kleenex out of my pocket and was pulled out of line and frisked during the security screening.  It was embarrassing, but—nothing terrible, and I guessed I deserved it.  I just didn’t think about the package of tissues in my back pocket. But, when we deboarded the plane (after sitting on the runway close to an hour, I started to feel a little anxious. And when (after about 5 hours of waiting in the terminal) they put me on a different flight –through Charlotte— to sit in another terminal for another 3 hours and catch another flight to Houston that would get me home close to midnight, I was starting to feel a little frustrated not only with United Airlines, but also with God.  Hey –Lord!  I cast my burdens on you. I don’t like to travel, but I did it anyway! And look what happens!  Why aren’t you sustaining me?  I need to get home. And of course, as things go, around 11pm I was still in Charlotte and my flight to Houston was cancelled.  I had now been in one airport or another for over 18 hours.  And I was feeling a little unsustained. 

Plus, everything was closed. I was wandering through an incomprehensibly huge airport far from home and far from anyone who cared, and all the lights were going out. As if they were actually shutting down.  You’d think that at least the bars would stay open!  But no. It was me, and a few thousand other anxious travelers and the cleaning crews, caught in a strange Kafkaesque nightmare of cheery signs and gliding walkways and rows of empty wooden rocking chairs, and that voice overhead that kept calling out its messages welcoming us to Charlotte and reminding us not to leave our luggage unattended.  Luckily, I still had a granola bar and some chewing gum.  At one point it was almost comical. I couldn’t even find a help desk or an airline person to ask what I was supposed to do about getting a new flight. Of course, finally I did.  But I want to talk about something else that happened.

As I was wandering through the airport feeling a little sorry for myself, I saw a sign that said Chapel with an arrow pointing upstairs. So I took followed the arrow up the stairs and found a tiny room with a few benches and what looked like a makeshift altar (made out of a school desk). There were “inspirational” posters on the walls that also looked like they might have come from a classroom. And as I sat down, I noticed, there was also a man on the floor.  My first thought was that it was someone sleeping. And that he looked terribly uncomfortable, sleeping all balled up with his face to the floor. I thought: this poor man. His flight has been cancelled too, and he has found the one quiet place to curl up and take a nap.  Taking out my rosary, I made the sign of the cross and began to pray. The man on the floor moved. He hadn’t been sleeping, he’d been praying. He rose up on all four and looked at me –probably as shocked as I was to find someone else in the chapel at that hour. We nodded to each other and he finished his prayers, rolled up the prayer rug he was kneeling on, and put it atop a pile of prayer rugs in the corner and quietly slipped away.  I prayed my Rosary and did the same.  But all the time I was thinking of that man; how the two of us had found our way to this place at this hour, in some sense we had found each other.  And somehow that comforted me.  I had been walking through that cavernous building, looking at all the closed stores and the desolate food court, noticing all the shadowy, isolated figures slumping over on benches or in chairs, sleeping, waiting.  Occasionally, I would catch sight of someone rushing up to hug someone who had just arrived; taking the suitcase from their hands, they would walk away together arm in arm, talking excitedly, heading off to family, friends and a comfortable bed.  And, past midnight I was still wandering, feeling desolate, alone, until I found the chapel and the skinny little Muslim man down on his knees, saying his prayers.

You see, I was trying to bear my burdens, I was trying to be strong and self-sufficient and good-humored and cheerful, but I was (in fact) simply clinging to my burdens as if they were trophies. I was feeling sorry for myself, and feeling like somehow, I was earning something special by suffering all of this. God was going to owe me!!  But, instead I was being taught a lesson.  I was being taught how to let God sustain me. And the way to do that isn’t by sucking it up and “being strong,” or ‘taking it like a man,” but it is simply by letting go and giving it to God. When things are going badly, times are hard, life is rough, give it to God. Go into some quiet place and sit down (or kneel down) and offer it to Him in prayer.  He will sustain you.

Soon after leaving the chapel I found the help desk and was rescued by an attendant who arranged a flight for me that didn’t get cancelled, and even got me a voucher for a hotel room (so I could go sleep for 4 ½ hours before coming back to the airport to try my hand at the security scanner once again.

It’s not easy, but it is very simple:  Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you.

(on the other hand, I still don't like to travel....)

Psalm 22 and the witness of the Cross

“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”

–Psalm 22:1

The opening line of Psalm 22 is very familiar to Christians everywhere.  It is a line repeated by Jesus from the cross; one of his seven last words.  For a long time now I have known that it comes from a psalm, and perhaps –if asked—could have even told (guessed) you which one; but I wouldn’t have said that it was the opening line.  I didn’t remember that. And this morning as I read Psalm 22 I was struck by the fact that it is the first words of the psalm. And I was intrigued by that. And I began to prayerfully wonder (which is something a lot like contemplation).

When Jesus said this from the cross was He offering or attempting something more than just a personal cry of agony, or prayer?  I wonder.  Was He speaking the psalm simply as a cry to His Father, or was there more to it? Was it also a cry from all humanity trapped in sin?

“Him who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf…” (2 Cor 5:21)

Crying out to the Father from the very heart of sin, He uses the words of a psalm—words any devout Jew might have known, been familiar with, and thus invites His witnesses, His friends, those who remained with Him at the cross: Mary (His mother), John (the apostle), Mary, the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James and Joses… invites them to join Him in prayer.  Think about it.  When someone begins a familiar prayer (the Lord’s prayer, for instance), think how quickly do your lips begin forming the words, unconsciously you find yourself joining in.  I have witnessed unbelievers who know this prayer begin speaking it without thinking because someone else has started it.  The words just comes out. And suddenly a group of people are praying together because one of them started with those familiar eternal words: Our Father…

And so I began to wonder, to contemplate: Did those who remained with Him, at the foot of the cross, did they continue the prayer of that psalm? As His voice failed, as His breath failed, was there a pause and then –realizing what He had said—gazing into His pain—did they continue it for Him? As a comfort to Him? The only consolation they could offer?  Did they pray the psalm for Him? 

Sometimes it is all we can do.  We can’t fix the problem, can’t ease the pain, all we can do is remain and when those we love can no longer even pray for themselves, we can… we can sit by their side, share their burden, and pray their prayers for them.  You will be surprised at what a blessing that can be.  

Him who knew no sin, became sin for us—and through Him, sin itself cried out to Heaven: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  Lent is beginning this week; perhaps over these next 40 days we can make some time (once a day, once a week) to still our hearts and join Him in His prayer for us.