God Is The Intercessor

History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. Our role in creating history has this important qualification, however. We are always preceded in intercession by God. God is always already praying in us. When we turn to pray, it is already the second step of prayer. We join with God in a prayer already going on in us and in the world.

The Spirit also helps us in our present limitations. For example, we do not know how to pray worthily, but God's Spirit within us is actually praying for us in those agonizing longings which cannot find words. The person who knows the heart's secrets understands the Spirit's intention as he or she prays according to God's will for those who love God. (Romans 8:26-27)

This groaning of the Holy Spirit within us echoes and gathers up two other groanings mentioned in the previous paragraph: the groaning of the whole creation in pangs of childbirth (Romans 8:22); and we ourselves, who groan inwardly as we await the ultimate transformation: the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:23).

The Spirit gathers up all this pain and releases it through us with sighs too deep for words. These sighs are not our own sighs, given articulation by the Spirit. They are the actual groanings of the Spirit within us, and they must be given articulation by us. (The New English Bible version seems to imply that we are the ones who sigh -- "through our inarticulate groans the Spirit herself is pleading for us." I am following Phillips's translation here, taking the phrase "the one who searches the heart" to refer to the discerning person who prays, rather than to God, as most other versions do.)

The Spirit as Wailing Wall

THIS GROANING OF THE SPIRIT within us is related to the groaning of the created order, subjected, as it is, to futility (Romans 8:20). We are inundated by the cries of an entire creation: the millions now starving to death each year, the tortured, the victims of sexual abuse or battering, the ill.

But that is not all; we also bear inexpressible sorrow for all the species that have become extinct and those on the verge of extinction, the plants and trees and fish dying of pollution, the living beings dislocated or killed by forest fires, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and the like. We are so interconnected with all of life that we cannot help being touched by the pain of all that suffers. The more highly developed our consciousness becomes, the more terribly the knowledge and anguish of that suffering weighs on us, until we risk being crushed by the enormity of it all.

It seems to me that more and more people are aware of being episodically depressed -- people who never experienced depression before. I do not believe their depression is neurotic, but rather a sign of health, reflecting their heightened capacity to take in the suffering of the planet. There is something impersonal and objective about this depression that bespeaks a high degree of moral development. The world has shrunk. The capsizing of a ferry boat in the Philippines, or the strife between different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, now makes front-page headlines. We are literally drowning in news of suffering from all around the globe. We cannot help being affected by it. How much more, then, those who have deliberately opened their hearts to the creation as one family in God?

We humans are far too frail and tiny to bear all that pain. The solution is not avoidance, however. Not reading or listening to the news is no protection; I am convinced that our solidarity with all of life is somatic, and that we sense the universal suffering whether we wish to or not.

What we need is a portable form of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where we can unburden ourselves of this accumulated suffering. We need to experience it; it is a part of reality. Our task in praying is precisely that of giving speech to the Spirit's groanings within us. But we must not try to bear the sufferings of the creation ourselves.

We are to articulate these agonizing longings and let them pass through us to God. Only the heart of the loving God can endure such a weight of suffering. Our attempts to bear them (and our depression is evidence that we try) are masochistic, falsely messianic, and finally idolatrous, as if there were no God, as if we had to carry this burden all by ourselves.

So the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know how to pray as we ought. But this does not mean, as it is most often taken, that we lack the proper techniques. Our ignorance is not that we do not know the right methods, but precisely that we think we know how to pray. We think it is something we do. It is not. How could it be, if we do not even know how to pray as we ought?

We learn to pray by stopping trying to pray and simply listening, trying to hear the prayer already being prayed in us. And what we hear is a strange kind of help. The Spirit groans in us inarticulately, wordlessly. It teaches us to pray by inducing us to give words to these groanings. Our task is simply to bring the Spirit's utterances to language, to consciousness, to awareness.

God Prays in Us

BEFORE WE EVEN make ready to pray, then, before we realize that the universe is in travail in us, before we even allow that groaning to rise to consciousness, God has already initiated our prayer. It is a wholly erroneous habit of Christian prayer, therefore, to call on God or the Holy Spirit to be present with us. It is we who need to be present to the always-present Holy Spirit.

We do not turn to God and try to make contact through prayer. The Holy Spirit is already groaning in us. We would not even think of praying had not the Holy Spirit's groaning in us prompted us to do so. We are only able to pray because God is always, incessantly, praying in us. Perhaps this is what Pascal meant when he said, speaking for God, "You would not seek me, had you not already found me. "

The Holy Spirit is like a substrate of molten magma under the Earth's crust, trying to erupt volcanically in each of us. It does not have to be invoked, but merely allowed; not called to be present, but acknowledged as present already. Our task is not to mobilize God, but rather to bring our consciousness and commitment to God, to give articulation to the inarticulate groanings within our souls, to bring God's longings to speech.

As Richard Rohr puts it in Prayer As a Political Activity:

To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all. To keep praying is to have no house to protect because there is only One House. And that One House is everybody's Home ... That is the politics of prayer. And that is probably why truly spiritual people are always a threat to politicians of any sort. They want our allegiance and we can no longer give it. Our house is too big.

By now I can sense certain justice activists bristling with impatience. I am in complete sympathy. We have all known pious Christians for whom prayer is a substitute for action, who dump on God the responsibility for doing what God's groaning in us is seeking to impel us to do.

A particularly bizarre example took place in the church I attend. An elderly woman had sat through the entire service. Toward the end, during the prayers of intercession, she prayed that God would send help to her husband in his hour of need. After the prayer, during the passing of the peace, several people hurried over to ask what had happened to her husband. She explained that he had been taking a bath that morning to get ready for church and could not get out of the tub. She was too weak to lift him alone, so she left for church, promising to send help. On that, several worshipers rushed to the house and found him still in the tub, two hours later!

But action is also no substitute for prayer. For some, action is a cover for unbelief; they simply do not believe that God is able to act in the world. Since God cannot change things, they reason, we must. For others, perhaps who feel called by God to establish justice, prayer may seem a waste of precious time. But long-term struggle requires constant inner renewal, else the wells of love run dry.

Social action without prayer is soul-less; but prayer without action, as in the story above, can be just plain stupid. Why should we choose between them, when neither is valid without the other?

Maybe this is why Jesus teaches us to command God, in the imperative mood. The scandal that such audacious and indecorous behavior evokes among so many Christians, who are more concerned about etiquette than ethics, is mitigated if God is the intercessor. It is God who is crying out within us, God who is seeking to find in us a voice which will articulate the divine longing, God who causes us to cry out to God in a voice of command and who thus completes the circuit.

For us to be this open and vulnerable to both the pain of the world and the anguish of God would be unendurable, unless it is matched with a precise sense of divine vocation. We must let all the pain that our receptors pick up pass through us. But then we must not attempt to "fix" it all ourselves, but to do only that which God calls us to do, and not one thing more.

This paradox of divine effortlessness is spelled out by Jesus in a terrible double-pincered saying in the Sermon on the Mount. On the one hand, we must act and not just profess faith: "Not every one who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." God wants not talk but action.

On the other hand, however, those who think that what God wants is action are chastised as well: "On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers'" (Matthew 7: 21-23). To do even miracles of compassion, when God has not specifically called us to do so, is to be evildoers.

God invites us, in short, not to conform to collective notions of what constitutes Christian behavior, but to seek the specific shape of our own divine calling in the day-to-day working out of our relationship with God.

We are not called to do everything, to heal everything, to change everything, but only to do what God asks of us. And in the asking is supplied the power to perform it. We are free from the paralysis that results from being overwhelmed by the immensity of the world's need and our relative powerlessness. We are freed from messianic megalomania, in which we try to heal everyone that hurts.

If we are sharply attentive to what God wants of us, we can then very modestly, in the strength of God, anticipate the impossible: to expect miracles within that delimited sector in which we have been given to work. We must expect miracles, because the God who has called us to act at this precise time and place also is at work within us. The groaning of the Holy Spirit inside us is the hum of a great dynamo producing the power to envision and act. Without being so borne up, we could not bear to engage the powers.

Walter Wink was a 1989-90 peace fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, and the author of Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa when this article appeared. This two-part series is excerpted from volume three of his series on the powers, Engaging the Powers: The Spirituality of Social Struggle (Fortress Press). Part one in our series appeared in October 1990.