In today’s second reading we had just two verses from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 8. They concern how we pray in the Holy Spirit, or how the Holy Spirit prays in us.
Chapter 8 of Romans is all about Life in the Spirit, which is an essential aspect of Life in Christ. In Christ we have been redeemed, justified, adopted as Sons, sanctified and - at least incipiently - glorified. But as we’re painfully aware, we’re not yet in heaven. We have already been saved, says St. Paul, just before our passage, but in hope (v. 24: “spe salvi”). How then can we live, as we should, in a totally God-ward direction, while still in this world, with all its troubles; while still in the body, with all its many limitations; while still carrying around with us our human weaknesses, both physical and moral? How can we poor mortal creatures relate now to a God who is infinite and eternal, and who utterly exceeds our imagination and understanding? How, in short, can we pray?
St. Paul answers us here with ringing confidence. God himself dwells within us through his Holy Spirit. He continually breathes life into us, as in the beginning he breathed life into Adam. Through the Holy Spirit we already possess that divine Life towards which we are straining. Because of Jesus, and because of the Holy Spirit, the metaphysical gulf that separates us from God has already been bridged.
The Holy Spirit - himself God, no less than Father or Son - directs us in our daily actions. He does that especially through the seven Gifts, with which we are sealed in the Sacrament of Confirmation. But above all the Holy Spirit directs our prayer. That is, He directs our attempts to reach out or up to God; our longing for God, for heaven, for eternal life. St. Paul says here that in principle we don’t know how to pray as we ought. Surely everyone who ever tries to pray has experience of this! Of course at one level we do know perfectly well how to pray. Jesus taught us. We say: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...” and the rest. But however excellent these words are, merely to repeat them is not yet the same as praying as we ought. Our prayer ought to be one with the prayer of Jesus. We ought to live within his own union with his Father. We ought to have his mind in us: our hearts conformed to his Heart. Also: we ought not to become discouraged, but sometimes we are. Our prayer ought to be easy, but sometimes it seems difficult, or even impossible. The words we use sometimes even seem to lose their meaning, and our minds can feel just empty, cold and dead.
You might think St. Paul would say the Holy Spirit really gets to work within us when our beautiful rhetoric flows; when we are lifted up in ecstasies, and when we hear, see or speak divine things; when we perform miracles, and everything to do with God seems easy for us. Well, of course the Holy Spirit certainly can and sometimes does effect all that. But for St. Paul, the work of the Spirit is manifested within us above all when we stand before God as ignorant, inarticulate, helpless. The experience of things going badly in this sense is more useful, and more typical, than the experience of things going well. What matters above all is to realise our total dependence on God. Only God can get us to God! But, Paul says - and he’s right! - through the indwelling, ever active, ever life-giving Spirit, God does get us to God!
By the power of the Holy Spirit, then, our prayer is made deeper, more powerful, more effective, more sanctifying, more transformative, more unitive, than we could ever make it ourselves. By the power of the Holy Spirit, what in us is mere dross is turned into gold. All we have to do then is persevere, and never give up. Sometimes we feel our prayer is going nowhere; we can find no words or thoughts to express it; there seems to be no point in continuing. But we do continue, because we still believe, and hope, and love. And subsequently it becomes clear that our prayer has been effective - and wonderfully so - after all.
St. Paul talks here about groanings beyond utterance. So we needn’t understand what’s going on in our prayer. We needn’t feel we’re perfectly in control, and we needn’t feel our prayer is particularly successful or satisfying. The inexpressible groanings prompted by the Spirit express hunger rather than repletion; longing rather than possession; dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction. To help us give them the space or opportunity they need, we can also use the set words of prayer. That’s why ceaseless repetition is such a good idea. As we repeat the holy Name of Jesus, or phrases from the Lord’s Prayer, or from the Hail Mary, or we recite the Psalms, round and round, and over and over again, we put ourselves, as it were, in the way of the Holy Spirit, asking Him to breathe or blow, through these words, towards God.
This breathing or blowing of the Holy Spirit will of itself cast divine love into our hearts (cf. Rm 5:5): more love than we could imagine possible; even more love than it’s possible to bear. It will also make Jesus present to us, in us, through us, and it will give great glory to God the Father.
Of course the supreme prayer of the Church is the Holy Mass. Here above all the Holy Spirit is active, and Jesus is present, and glory is given to God. Here by divine power our Christian lives are nourished; here we become more truly what we are; here God takes up our human weakness, and directs it towards himself. Here, through the words and actions of the liturgy, we are able to pray in the Spirit according to the mind of God (cf. v. 27): and God knows what is the mind of the Spirit.