The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.
We know how to say prayers. Indeed, we have abundant resources in terms of written prayers, litanies, and devotions that help us to pray. We have the prayer Jesus himself taught us, as well as the rosary. This truly is inestimable wealth and we should not ignore it. But even with all this we still sense the need to go deeper and to enter into a truly personal communion with God himself. We want to say more to God than we know how to say. We desire to ask more than we know how to ask. He himself invited us to ask, to seek, and to knock. But we rightly come to realize that there is a depth possible in prayer beyond what we have attained and that our words, even our most exalted and poetic words, our most humble and sincere words, inevitably fall short of realizing the promise. When we come up against these human limitations in our prayer life we can learn that the deepest prayers we pray are not the result of our intellect, our emotions, or even, finally, of our will. They can only come from the Spirit praying within us.
And the one who searches hearts
knows what is the intention of the Spirit,
because he intercedes for the holy ones
according to God’s will.
We are called to conform ourselves to Christ, so that we may enter through the narrow gate, since Christ himself is the gate for the sheep (see John 10:9). This can only happen through a life of prayer in which we come to know the Lord and he in turn comes to recognize us. This ensures that we don't risk standing outside and knocking, but hearing in reply, 'I do not know where you are from.' We are called to strive after this goal, not on our own, but with the help of the Spirit. In our strivings we are to open ourselves up to his "inexpressible groanings", his own effort when our strength is insufficient. Thus we are told that "it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (see Philippians 2:13). That God is the one who does the work makes it no less true that we must strive to enter, that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that is, that we must in every way commit ourselves to relying entirely on this new life of the Spirit within us.
Jesus will bear our burdens and share our yoke if we come to him, if we preserve together with him, but we must still be careful not to fall back into self-reliance, to striving with our own strength, for if we do we will surely not be strong enough. The image is inadequate, but one imagines the Spirit as a weightlifting spotter who ensures that we are not crushed by the weights we attempt to lift, whose assistance allows us to genuinely grow, but who will ultimately put the bar back in the rack when our own strength is exhausted. His encouragement, though is not merely as one standing behind us cheering us on, but as one striving from within our very soul.
We know that all things work for good for those who love God,
who are called according to his purpose.
We don't always experience all things as working for our good. But the perspective of faith makes it possible to see things from a higher vantage point. It testifies that circumstances are conspiring to make us, not healthy, not comfortable necessarily, but holy. The more we rely on the love of God poured into our hearts by his Spirit the more we truly become "those who love God, who are called according to his purpose". When this describes us there can be no stopping us, for we are then in the will of God, who is himself unstoppable.
For those he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son,
so that he might be the firstborn
among many brothers.
We are invited to a feast in the Kingdom of God. We are daily offered a foretaste of the feast. Let us not be content to have Jesus merely near us when we eat and drink, not content to merely know that he is teaching in our streets. Rather, let us know, let us strive to know the Lord (see Hosea 6:3). The key to entry into the fullness of the feast, and the key to entering more deeply into the mass each day is growing in our relationship with the Lord. This brings us full circle to prayer, to relying on the Spirit's strength when our own words fall short.
Let my heart rejoice in your salvation;
let me sing of the LORD, “He has been good to me.”
No comments:
Post a Comment