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July 23, 2023: How's Your Prayer Life?
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Prayer is the heart and soul in the life of a Christian. In seminary, we had the habit of asking each other, “How’s your prayer life?” Most times, the answer came back, “Not bad, but could be better.” Then the next question, “Well, then how could it be better than where it stands at this time?” Then we had to pause and think about where our prayer life could be better than what it was. Better, when referring to prayer, means drawing deeper into the life of Christ Jesus and all that his life is.
When we think of the idea and practice of prayer, maybe some of the initial appropriate questions we can ask ourselves is not, “How’s my prayer life?” like seminarians do quite often. Maybe the better questions for many of us would be, “What are the spiritual benefits that flow from a devoted prayer life? A consistent, daily prayer life that finds time for the Lord wherever we find ourselves in the world? Do I waste my time with the practice of prayer? Is God really listening to what I have to say? Does God actually consider my words spoken in humility and honesty? Does God have too many other petitions to respond to, placing my petitions on the back-burner? Does God even have a back-burner, or does every prayer spoken in confidence and good intention remain in the forefront of God’s mind? The same mind of which the Scripture asks, ‘Who can know the mind of God? Who has been his counselor?’” We know the answer, I pray, which is “No one.” God does not have a counselor, or a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or even someone to bounce things off. The Lord figures it out all on his own, for who can give God advice to be heeded over and above his Divine thoughts? We probably know many such folks who believe they can do this, but in actuality, no one can. Which is fine.
This sounds rather controlling, does it not? That God makes all the decisions for our life, death, and eternal life. On the surface, God making decisions on what we bring to the Lord in prayer appears controlling. But it’s really not, if and when we consider the God we pray to. We do not pray to the Old Testament god Baal, which the Israelites eventually did during the lengthy reign of their kings. Not all of them were King David or his son King Solomon. Not all of them were good kings in union with the will of God. After Solomon, things got ugly really fast in Israel. When they worshipped and bowed down before Baal, the god of nothing and no one, they obviously received no answer. There was no comeback. No response. Full silence is what happens when people pray to gods who do not exist, or exist only in one’s mind, or gods who cannot save, like Jesus does. And lest we forget the golden calf incident with the Israelites after God released them from the bondage of slavery, bowing down and worshipping a fake animal that didn’t even eat hay. What it did eat and destroy was a number of human souls, which false gods do, even though they don’t exist. The prayers of the Israelites ended in the dustbin of history along with their phony calf, a story that reminds us of God’s justifiable wrath we want no part of.
Maybe the false types of worship just named above is why we like to think that the prayers of children are the most innocent and heartfelt. Children do not pray to golden calves. They speak the most attractive and loving prayers in the eyes of adults. It’s no surprise Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, for to such belongs the Kingdom of God.” The prayers of children, in my personal opinion, are the most beautiful prayers God has the joy of listening to each day. Teaching your children and grandchildren to pray fills the heart of God with gratitude toward the parent and/or grandparent who does the teaching. Yes, God is filled with gratitude toward parents for teaching your children to pray. Teaching your children and grandchildren to pray sets them up for a life of holy communication with their Creator. Such seeds planted in the hearts and minds of young children are some of the most natural seeds an adult can plant in the heart of a child, which nowadays is infinitely better and healthier than some of the “seeds” they learn in school. Parental prayer-seeds are seeds of love and praise, togetherness and oneness with the Lord that will produce thirty, sixty, and one hundred-fold over the course of their children’s lives. Personally, I thank my parents above all for the faith they passed on to me. Then, a close second and not disconnected from faith in Jesus exemplified in my parents was their teaching my siblings and I how to pray, along with the essential importance of prayer. I think of my mother who was a prayer warrior. She could move mountains with her devoted prayer life. My father? He could move a small pile or two.
But God listens and attends to not only the sacred prayers of children. The Lord is in tune with us adults too. In fact, I would say in my experience as a priest, the closer we draw to the end of our lives on earth, the more potent our solemn and faithful prayers are before God. It makes sense that the closer we move toward the time it comes for our turn to enter the eternal phase of our condition, special attention, if you will, is paid to the person who inches toward what we hope to be a loving and merciful encounter with God.
In speaking with some family members recently about the impending death of their mother, our conversation revolved around all that was happening invisibly behind the scenes of her approaching death. Even in the condition of not being able to speak any longer, the groans a person will make as they draw closer to the goal line of life, are prayers that God alone can understand and accept. As for my own prayer life, I find at times that groaning replaces words. Groaning is a form of prayer that can be described as a condition of prayer that advances, for whatever reason, beyond the ability or desire to speak clearly. We reach a point when words just don’t do it for us in our communication with God. When this point is upon us in our prayer life, we create a rough language that emanates from our hearts, making verbal sounds that, for adults, grab the attention of God like no other prayer.
And then there’s what we can call the ultimate prayer for us, where “the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.” Is there anything better than the third person of the Trinity praying on our behalf? I’m not sure there is! We hear the above attention-grabbing verse proclaimed in this Sunday’s second reading from Paul to the Romans. When I ponder this verse, my first thought is one of gratitude and thanks to God for being so attentive and so close to my life. where God’s attentiveness to my personal need of the Holy Spirit will take over my prayer life because I simply cannot figure out what to say. Anytime God wants to lead the way, which should be all the time, may we be all for it. The Spirit’s inexpressible groanings referred to in chapter 8 of Romans comes about, I suspect, when some situation in life has brought us to a point of surrendering to God, even though our entire life should be a surrender to God. Among other situations in life, this verse from Romans is certainly the walk of transformation that leads to our own death, as well as that of having to deal with the passing of others whom we know and love. Such difficult and hard matters will many times leave us “speechless,” where words cannot be had, and where our groaning and the Spirit’s groaning for us is all we have left in the physical and spiritual tank.
St. Paul had many reasons to groan in prayer, given the untold amounts of suffering he knew in the name of the Lord Jesus. From his shipwrecks to his body wrecked by scourges and blows, this was an Apostle whose humble suffering led him to not only write this verse in Romans 8, but having lived it well before he wrote the words through the inspiration of the same (and only) Holy Spirit who groaned on the Apostle’s behalf. There’s something to be said over and over for experience in suffering, and how the ones who suffer the most in our world, not only from disease and illness, but also from loneliness, abandonment, rejection, or any form of human weakness, how they draw from the Spirit’s closeness in ways that others may not. St. Paul was as close to the Spirit of God as any person, except for Jesus and Mary. To the point of knowing the Spirit’s groaning on his behalf, coupled with his own groaning.
May we possess the wisdom and trust to leave room for this type of prayer – the Spirit’s groaning - in our prayer lives. Meaningful prayer is not only about speaking to God, saying “the right things.” Granted, doing so is all-important for any believer who is faithful to their life of daily prayer. I think of the repetition of the Rosary and how unbelievably beautiful the entire prayer is, and how this prayer on the mysteries of our Lord’s life and his Mother’s role will bring peace to the human soul. I suspect praying a daily Rosary has prevented many human hearts and minds from falling into a state of depression. There is no scientific proof on this statement, but common sense and faith tells us it is so. However, may we be open to stretching our prayer lives to its maximum length, where on the far end of good prayer we find the Holy Spirit praying for us personally through holy groans that give us hope. So, if you happen to hear some groaning from above, may it place a smile on your face and love in your heart, knowing that God is so close to us, thanking the Lord for being so close.