St. Paul says something disagreeable to us in that second reading: He says that we do not know how to pray.
On the surface, it’s a harsh judgment, because many of us are here every week trying to pray, after all. But the fact is, it can be very hard to feel like we do know how. and many of us would find it hard to tell someone that we know how to pray, with the same confidence we would tell them we know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Prayer can be hard; everyone who prays struggles with distractions, everyone wonders if they are using the right words or routines or doing it often enough, and we wonder also on some days how we know God is paying attention. So we ask ourselves, do I know how to pray?
What Paul is raising today, though, is maybe not so much how to pray, all the ways we might go about it, but another problem with prayer that we don’t often think of: Many times, we don’t know what to ask for. That’s not always true, of course. In times of urgent trouble, it’s not hard for us to know what we want. We want God to fix things, we ask for health and relief for ourselves or people close to us. Or we want help in a difficult situation, or some inspiration before a test or a difficult conversation. But beyond that, what do we want, in our heart of hearts? Paul seems to think there’s something really, really big that we want, or ought to want, because he says that when we can’t pray the way we ought to be praying, the Spirit does the praying for us, and he uses dramatic language to describe what that’s like: the Spirit’s prayer is groaning within us, or as another translation says, sighing with sighs too deep for words. That, to Paul, is the kind of prayer he is looking for.
Apparently what he means is that prayer is about desire, desire for something so big we don’t even know we can be asking for it, desire for closeness with God, desire for what Paul calls redemption, desire for a life that is much more significant than we think our current life is, desire for what Matthew in today’s gospel calls the kingdom of heaven.
Do we want that? What is that kingdom of heaven like? Today’s gospel tells us it seems to be about small things miraculously becoming bigger. All three of Jesus’ parables are images of growth, wheat that grows up, even in the middle of weeds, yeast that miraculously turns flour into quantities of bread, a little seed that becomes a huge tree. They are things that look insignificant becoming gloriously larger, maybe surrounded by weeds, but still growing. This “bigness” image isn’t that the kingdom of heaven is all about a bigger and better life. Many of us spend time looking for that kind of a life, and usually that attempt leaves us empty. The growth here isn’t the growth of the success or business gurus. The growth here is in our capacity to love, it’s growing in our realization that almost everything else in life pales in comparison to what God offers us, in the future but also right now. It’s growing so that we realize how much more miraculous life is than we usually think, how close an interest God has in us, how much love surrounds us at every hour, how God surrounds us even when we are not noticing. That is the goal of our prayer, that kind of growth, that kind of closeness. That is what to pray for. Even if we think the hour is late, or we have nothing to offer God, that’s not how God sees it. God is leading us towards it all the time, hoping that we will ask, and we will see something small become enormous.
What this means for prayer is simply that most of the time we probably don’t ask for enough, we don’t realize what kind of an awareness of God it is possible to have, so we don’t even realize how much we want it. So our prayer can be difficult, or maybe even not that interesting to us, since that desire, that groaning and sighing that St. Paul talks about, isn’t quite there.
The author of one wonderful book on prayer that I’ll tell you about afterwards if you’re interested says that once he met a man out walking his dog. This particular dog had led a very difficult early life, kept in a pen that was much too small for him, and even now, out walking without a leash in some beautiful countryside, he didn’t run around like other dogs, but instead kept circling in a very small area. That’s an image, this author says, of our prayer life. We don’t realize how much room there is open to us, how far we can run, how much we can ask for. So the answer today to that question about whether we know how to pray or not, isn’t so much about the how – we’re all different, and we’ll all pray very differently. But instead of the how, start thinking about the what of what you are praying for. And start thinking big. Very big.