July 24, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

With Sighs Too Deep for Words

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–11
Romans 8:18–39

Anyone can pray when the heart is bubbling over. . . . But when the spirit is dry and all surface desire gone, then is the time when we learn to whom we really belong.

Douglas Steere

My husband, Kent Organ, is also a Presbyterian pastor. Last weekend Kent and I were guests in the home of a couple who have been members of Fourth Church for more than thirty years. The other four guests were also active members of this church. When it came time to say grace before dinner, someone said, “With all these pastors here, who will pray?” And our host said, “I will.” It truly warms a pastor’s heart when a church member claims the role of praying aloud rather than relying on the pastor. All of us can pray, using familiar words that we would use in a regular conversation, expressing honestly to God what is on our hearts. One doesn’t need to be a professional to pray to God.

Not that there aren’t professional pray-ers. There was a man in Texas who charged a fee to come to a convention, meeting, or club and give an invocation. His pious eloquence made him famous and earned him a fine living. He pleased audiences who often gave him a standing ovation after his invocations.

But that is not the kind of praying that the scriptures describe. They say nothing about eloquence, ease, or impressing anyone. God is the focus of our prayers. There is an anecdote about Bill Moyers when he worked for President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson asked Moyers to pray before a meeting, which Moyers did. Johnson interrupted him, saying, “Speak louder. I can’t hear you.” To which Moyers replied, “With all due respect, Mr. President, the prayer is addressed to God, not to you.”

Our prayers are addressed to God. If we really reflect on that, that we are speaking to the Creator of the universe, the Divine Mystery beyond our grasp, we may well be humbled, even rendered speechless. Or sometimes we may become so comfortable in our ritual that we forget whom we are addressing. Annie Dillard wrote:

The higher Christian churches [a category that would include Fourth Church] . . . come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom. (Holy the Firm, p. 59)

The Apostle Paul wrote, “We do not know how to pray as we ought.” Perhaps being inadequate in praying comes from rightly recognizing who we are and who God is.

There are other reasons we may find ourselves unable to pray. We may be suffering from some physical or mental illness that saps our vitality and consumes our attention. We may be so overwhelmed with grief at the death of a loved one or a major loss in our life that we can only silently stare off into space. It is not uncommon that the times when we need prayer the most are when we find ourselves tongue-tied. It is precisely in such times that hearing that others are praying for us can be so consoling.

While I was being treated for breast cancer recently, a close friend said, “I am praying for you. I thought that was the least I can do.” And I said, “And I think it is also the most you can do.” Intercessory prayer is a great gift we give one another.

When I am in difficult times, I find that I may be able to talk about what’s going on fairly straightforwardly. But when another prays aloud for me, that is when my tears may come. To be in a position of being prayed for is to be in a position of dependency, to recognize that we are completely reliant upon God and others. Our spirits are deeply stirred when others pray on our behalf, calling upon God when our own need or despair renders us speechless.

Sometimes—such as while watching the news on television, hearing about 76 people killed by a gunman in Norway, or seeing the emaciated bodies of children in Somalia, dying from starvation in a famine that has killed thousands—I am numbed by the tragedy. I find no words to pray.

Another reason that at times we do not know how to pray is that we have hit a dry spell in our spiritual journey. We may have found it easy to talk with God and listen to God for quite some time, and then that ends. All the desire and ease for prayer has left us, and prayer is the last thing we want to do. This feeling of dryness is so common and universal that books on prayer address it.

Douglas Steere wrote,

All prayer reaches plateaus where it loses the initial exhilaration of climbing. These are the times when a consolidation of our commitment may be taking place. In such times the testing of our real loyalty is in process. Anyone can pray when the heart is bubbling over; no loyalty is needed then. But when the spirit is dry and all surface desire gone, then is the time when we learn to whom we really belong. . . . It is perfectly natural that we should run into these rough patches, these “night shifts,” these dark nights, and that then, as never before, our prayers are needed.

“We should do well at this point . . . ,” Steere continues,

to examine ourselves as to whether some unfaced decision, some unyielded barrier, some personal relationship that needs correction stands back of this blackout in our desire for prayer. Closely linked to this must be our realization that if we are really . . . sensing what major changes in us are called for . . . it is almost inevitable that our own inner strategist will seek to hinder this change. And how could this be done more readily than by causing distaste for prayer and luring us toward a hundred counter calls?

It is here that our faithfulness will tell who it is we mean to serve. Only the sentimentalists depict prayer as a perpetual April. A good deal of prayer is framed in fall and winter, and much of the real work of prayer is best done in these very seasons. (Dimensions of Prayer, pp. 96–97)

How do we pray when we have no desire or are overwhelmed with grief or so aware of our creatureliness we know not what to say?

There are some wonderful stories in rabbinic literature that illustrate that God’s Spirit intercedes for us. One old Jewish legend tells of a little farmer boy who had been left an orphan at an early age and was unable to read. But he had inherited from his parents a large, heavy prayer book. It was now his. On the Day of Atonement, he took the prayer book into the synagogue and laid it on the table. Then he prayed, “O Lord of Creation, I do not know how to pray. I do not know what to say. So I give you the entire prayer book.”

Another Jewish legend tells of an old man in the same town who overslept and missed the service on the Day of Atonement, which meant that the prayers offered for the people did not include him. Not knowing how to pray himself, he devised a plan. He repeated the letters of the alphabet over and over and over again and then asked God to arrange them in the words of an appropriate prayer.

Perhaps the best we can do is show up and pay attention. We can glean from some Zen wisdom:

Sitting still,
Doing nothing.
Spring comes
And the grass grows by itself.

Or perhaps all we can do is cry or sigh, moan or groan. That is the Holy Spirit, praying within us and for us. For “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. . . . That very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

Joyce Rupp wrote,

When we are experiencing the groaning within us—those webs of confusion or disorientation or loss—
when our life appears to be filled with failure and ungained dreams,
when darkness looms up large against the tiny light of our hope,
when our inner poverty gasps for a touch of fullness,
when our brokenness cries out to be mended,
it is then that our groaning is met with the Spirit of God who groans within us.

It is this God of life who blesses our inner birthing, standing by us, urging us to stay in the process, filling us with energy by the intimate touch of an eternal love shared with us. (Praying Our Goodbyes, p. 68)

“We can never begin to understand what prayer really is unless we see it as a response to the prior initiative of God,” says Douglas Steere (p. 9). The One to whom we are called to pray is the very One who first writes the prayer on our hearts. Our yearning—for God, for hope, for love, for a better world—is met in God’s yearning for us and with the same deep desire for a new creation. However transcendent and majestic God is, so, also, is God as close as our breath, as intimate as our inward moaning, as one with us as to share the same sigh. God searches our hearts. God knows us better than we know ourselves and cares for our every need. The good news is that whatever we seek, God’s answer comes, “You are loved. I love you and always will. And nothing can stop that. Nothing can separate us, ever. Remember who you are: you belong to me.” The Holy Spirit intercedes for us when we know not how to pray. Depend on it.