I wonder how often you find yourself lost for words. While some of us are more garrulous than others, it is an experience that comes to us all, particularly when we have experiences that either raise us to the heights or plunge us into the depths.
I wonder how often you have had that the experience of being lost for words as you pray. In prayer, it is possible that we might feel inadequate as we have heard others pray publicly and think that we are unable to pray as eloquently, so may not pray at all. Equally, we may experience what artists and writers experience, that is the difficulty of beginning – of putting words together or making marks on a pristine page. Equally, in prayer, we may have the experience of feeling that our words cannot match the experience we are having, whether or exaltation or depression. Whatever the reason, we are promised in today’s New Testament reading (Romans 8:26-30) that the Holy Spirit will help us in such moments.
St Paul acknowledges in this passage that such times come; that there are times when we find it hard to pray. We do not know how to pray he writes to the Church in Rome (Romans 8. 26) but in those times the Holy Spirit himself comes to help us by pleading with God for us in groans that words cannot express.
We are often quite restrained in our relationship with God and in our praying. Therefore, we will often praise God and say that we will obey or follow him but we rarely argue, protest, complain or question him, at least not publicly. Yet here Paul is saying that the Holy Spirit wishes to help us express our deepest feelings – the groans that words cannot express - to God. Doing so is part of our coming to know God more deeply.
Words, themselves, are sometimes inadequate to express how we feel, which may be why St Paul speaks here of groans that words cannot express. We will all have heard, for example, of the practice in some cultures of Keening. Keening can mean making any long, sad, or wailing sound but is, most famously, the act of making a loud, high-pitched lament for the dead in the Gaelic tradition of Ireland and Scotland. As a ritualized form of mourning involving crying, wailing, and singing over a deceased person, it recognises that words cannot express our grief in the moment of death and that what is needed to feel adequate to the moment are groans that words cannot express.
I had a similar experience following the untimely death of my brother when, at the airport in Pristina towards which the plane on which he had been travelling had been headed, I heard stories of the impact he had had on people in the Disaster Response Team with which he had been working in Kosovo and on the Kosovan people whom he had been helping to rebuild their homes following the conflict in their country. As those stories were told, all I could do was to cry continually; both at the sense of loss and because of a sense that God had received my brother Nick into his presence saying ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’. On that occasion, my tears were the groans that words cannot express.
I had the opposite experience as a young Christian when, following a service, I spent along time confessing by sins to God and then felt an overwhelming sense of joy that meant I was laughing continuously without being able to stop. I was at a campsite at the base of the Malvern Hills at the time and spent the evening wandering around that beautiful site laughing uncontrollably because of the sense of joy that words could not express that God had put into my heart that night.
Being lost for words is not a problem when it comes to prayer, instead it can be an opportunity for us to become open to God in a new way that allows emotions, whether of joy or grief, to flow through us and from us in ways that touch both the depths and heights of our emotions.
Next time you encounter that sense of being lost for words when you are praying ask the Spirit to help you in your weakness, as you do not know how to pray as you ought, and the very Spirit will intercede in you with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, will know what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.
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Victoria Williams - Holy Spirit.
