The Solemnity of Pentecost would be upon us in a week, and I had a
few ideas warming up in my head through prayer and meditation. Usually, a relatively ‘good’ homily would
have such a nebulous foundation and a prompting in my heart would bring me to
narrow them down to one or two focal points and I would launch into writing out
my thoughts. But something happened last
week. I hit a ‘speed bump’ health wise. I caught a very bad case of Influenza A at
the beginning of the week, and ended up having to be hospitalized simply
because I was not any ordinary patient trying to overcome a simple bug. I was an immunity suppressed transplant survivor
who risked much in battling something which could potentially endanger my
life.
It was while I was in hospital and lying terribly enfeebled and
oftentimes almost in a daze with body temperatures rising to an almost scorching
40 degrees Centigrade, that I shared once again a certain incapacity and
powerlessness with countless others who may be in some similar state of
impotence and helplessness. I just could
not pray. Try as I might, I was weakened
to the point of exhaustion at times, and with the naïve innocence of a child brought
my mind to God and wondered if my fatigued and debilitated state itself could
at all be a prayer that would be acceptable.
The peace that I received was a blessed assurance, and it brought to
mind what St Paul said about the Spirit praying and interceding for us with
inexpressible groanings (Rom 8).
I am not often one who groans and moans much when ill. I may feel uncomfortable and even racked with
rigors from fevers, but I am more of a ‘silent sufferer’. There is already way too much noise in this
world, and I should not let my agony add to the existent cacophony. But I do know that many other people come
from the other side of this audible spectrum.
It was while I was in this incapacitated state of being early last week
that I had an inner experience of what it meant to pray – not in words, but in
groanings that were too deep for words, where the body’s prayer becomes one’s
entire prayer offering in union with the Spirit.
It would be mere naiveté and an over simplification to say that all
groanings can become prayer. If only it
were so. We need to be doing this in union with the Holy Spirit so that our
prayer without words are directed toward God.
It may not have always to be in a deliberate act of love, because God
will always love us where we are – we could be in a state of confoundedness,
confusion, disappointment, exasperation or even just experiencing ennui. When God is the object of these expressions
of our being human, it can lift and transform our human being to encounter the
divine. After all, this is the promise
of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit enables us to have a share in the divine
life.
This must be that point where spirituality goes beyond literacy, and
where the spirit of poverty so extolled by the Gospel rings true. When one’s awareness of the total otherness
of God in the sight of one’s own infinitesimal powerlessness, one knows with
great intuition that God is unimpressed by numbers, success, degrees, symbols
of status of any kind, and certainly not by one’s ordination. It puts a completely fresh understanding of
the Sermon on the Mount’s teaching of how happy are the poor.
I recently came across a wonderful short yet endearing speech given
by a genteel Benedictine monk and spiritual writer David Steindl-Rast on
happiness, where he surmised so wisely that one is only truly happy when one is
also truly grateful. You can only be
truly grateful when you have an experience of emptiness or poverty. Being filled, being sated and being
self-sufficient will hardly give one cause to be grateful or thankful, because
the human heart is always pining for more, whether of something different, or
more of the same. Only in this light
does it make sound spiritual sense to see not just the necessity but also the
good in poverty, in suffering, and in some forms of tribulations in life.
Being aware of one’s ineptitude (brought on with the virtue of
humility) clears the ground, so to speak, for God to make his divine entry into
our often-overfilled lives. Sometimes,
it is our afflicted state that precipitates this necessary emptying that allows
the Spirit to effectively pray in and with us, as I was to experience it
myself. If that were truly the case, how
can one not be grateful then, even for something like an illness? For with deep faith, even utterances as
incoherent as groanings can allow our whole selves to be presented to God as a
prayer that he can take delight in.
No comments:
Post a Comment