By Father Ron Rolheiser
… we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. (Romans 8:26)
St. Paul wrote those words and they contain both a stunning revelation and a wonderful consolation. There is deep prayer happening inside us beyond our conscious awareness and independent of our deliberate efforts.
Some years ago, a friend of mine bought a house that had sat empty and abandoned for a number of years. The surface of the driveway was cracked and a bamboo plant, now several feet high, had grown up through the pavement.
My friend cut down the bamboo tree, chopped down several feet into its roots to try to destroy them, poured a chemical poison into the root system in hopes of killing whatever was left, packed some gravel over the spot, and paved over the top with a thick layer of concrete. But the little tree was not so easily thwarted.
Two years later, the pavement began to heave as the bamboo plant again began to assert itself. Its powerful life force was still blindly pushing outward and upward, cement blockage notwithstanding.
God prays through usLife, all life, has powerful inner pressures and is not easily thwarted. It pushes relentlessly and blindly towards its own ends, irrespective of resistance. Sometimes resistance does kill it.
There are, as the saying goes, storms we cannot weather. But we do weather most of what life throws at us and our deep life-principle remains strong and robust, even as the frustrations we have experienced and the dreams in us that have been shamed slowly muzzle us into a mute despair so that our prayer lives begin to express less and less of what we are actually feeling.
It is through that very frustration that the Spirit prays, darkly, silently, in groans too deep for words. In our striving, our yearning, our broken dreams, our tears, in the daydreams we escape into, and even in our sexual desire, the Spirit of God prays through us, as does our soul, our life-principle.
Like the life forces innate in that bamboo plant, powerful forces are blindly working inside us too, pushing us outward and upward to eventually throw off whatever cement lies on top of us. This is true of our joys, also. The Spirit prays through our gratitude, both when we express it consciously, and even when we only sense it unconsciously.
Our deepest prayers are mostly not those we express in our churches and private oratories. Our deepest prayers are spoken in our silent gratitude and silent tears. The person praising God's name ecstatically and the person bitterly cursing God's name in anger are, in radically different ways of groaning, both praying.
The groans of our inadequacyThere are many lessons to be drawn from this. First, we can learn to forgive life a little more for its frustrations and we can learn to give ourselves permission to be more patient with life and with ourselves. Who of us does not lament that the pressures and frustrations of life keep us from fully enjoying life's pleasures, from smelling the flowers, from being more present to family, from celebrating with friends, from peaceful solitude and from deeper prayer?
So we are forever making resolutions to slow down, to find a quiet space inside our pressured lives in which to pray. But, after failing over and over again, we eventually despair of finding a quiet, contemplative space for prayer in our lives. Although we need to continue to search for that, we can already live with the consolation that, deep down, our very frustration in not being able to find that quiet space is already a prayer.
In the groans of our inadequacy, the Spirit is already praying through our bodies and souls in a way deeper than words.
One of the oldest, classical definitions of prayer defines it this way: Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God. Too often in our efforts to pray formally, both communally and privately, we fail to do that, namely, to actually lift our hearts and minds to God because what is really in our hearts and minds, alongside our gratitude and more gracious thoughts, is not something we generally connect with prayer at all.
Our frustrations, bitterness, jealousies, lusts, curses, sloth and quiet despair are usually understood to be the very antithesis of prayer, something to be overcome in order to pray.
But a deeper thing is happening under the surface. Our frustration, longing, lust, jealousy and escapist daydreams — things we are ashamed to take to prayer — are in fact already lifting our hearts and minds to God in more honest ways than we ever do consciously.
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. Contact him at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. document.getElementById('cloaka0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5').innerHTML = ''; var prefix = 'ma' + 'il' + 'to'; var path = 'hr' + 'ef' + '='; var addya0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5 = 'info' + '@'; addya0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5 = addya0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5 + 'ronrolheiser' + '.' + 'com'; var addy_texta0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5 = 'info' + '@' + 'ronrolheiser' + '.' + 'com';document.getElementById('cloaka0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5').innerHTML += ''+addy_texta0514815875f8024a4cafb077c0d24a5+''; .
March 27, 2014