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Email a FriendI’ve always loved that line - “with sighs too deep for words.” It reminds me that prayer goes beyond my intellectual (or not-so-intellectual!) thought, beyond what my mind can come up with, beyond what my ego struggles to get over. Prayer is much deeper, much more mysterious - and thank God for that!
Confused In Prayer?
Holy Spirit to the Rescue!
Posted by DariaSockey in Faith on Thursday, June 09, 2011 9:59 AM
This week, in the final days leading to the feast of Pentecost, the Church’s liturgy (Mass and Liturgy of the Hours) immerses us in all the many scriptural passages that talk about the nature and the actions of the Holy Spirit.
Tuesday evening’s vespers had those wonderful verses from Romans 8, worth quoting in full:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And He who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
What a relief!
If only I remembered this more often when I’m wondering whether I’m even asking for the right thing: should I pray for my son to stop dating a non-Catholic when he might, after all, be the means of her conversion?
Do I pray for this terminally ill elderly person to be cured, or for his happy death?
And then there are the days that I know there are people who have asked me to pray for them, but I can’t remember who it was or what they wanted prayers for.
Other times I’m so overcome with worry or sadness or fear or anger that I can barely formulate a coherent thought about anything, much less a prayer.
All I really have to do in these situations is to say, “Holy Spirit, you know how and what I should be praying. Please sort this out and pray in me according the will of God.”
I’m not sure which of the seven gifts this falls under. Maybe it is something separate. But it seems to me to be the greatest of all the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives.
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I just read this scripture last night as we were doing our novena to the Holy Spirit. I do think about the gift of praying in tongues when I read this scripture. I could go on and on about how wrong an understanding I had of this gift when I was a Protestant and how freaked out by it I was, but as I have come to understand the Catholic understanding of this beautiful gift, I see the benefit it is. It’s the Holy Spirit praying through us “with sighs too deep for words” when we don’t know how to pray. He knows how we should pray and does it for us.
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