My father and aunts sometimes tell about where they were when the announcement was made of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

My grandmother remembers Pearl Harbor. She was young, all things considered, but old enough to remember many of the effects World War 2 had on her little town and school.

For my generation, the “day that will live in infamy” in our memories is 9-11-2001.

Where were you on September 11? we ask each other. I was a senior at college.

This September 11, I’d like to take a moment to remember how that terrible day taught me–is still teaching me–to pray without words.

Of course nothing could be normal on that day. While some of us with first-hour classes dragged ourselves away from the news screens and tried to keep our attention on class (4th year Spanish, for example), the administration rewrote the day’s schedule to bring us all together into the gymnatorium. And after we’d exited the classroom just in time to see the second tower fall, we were all more than ready to scrap schoolwork and join together in prayer for our country.

The administration tried to say something appropriate, tried to wrap words around the unfolding situation. But how does one wrap words around the unspeakable?

In their attempts, they rambled on, and most of us were thinking one thing—“stop talking about it, and let’s all get to praying!” Even though I’m sure that chapel session was shorter than usual, I’d never sat through a longer set of remarks in my life! I don’t remember a single thing that was said beyond “we’re going to split you all up into prayer rooms by graduation year.” We might as well have adjourned at that moment, for all I heard of the rest.

The seniors were assigned a classroom in the new building. We gathered, we joined up into groups and pairs, some of us got down on our knees, and we started praying.

But how in the world do you pray on a day like that? How do you pray for something you can’t even wrap words around? Our hearts cried out to keep all-day vigil for those in the middle of it, but our words ran out before the first 30 minutes were up.

And that’s when an inner, gentle voice–the kindest most understanding voice in the world–whispered these two verses from Romans 8 to my heart:

In the same way the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ~ Romans 8:26-27 (CSB) ~

“The Spirit himself intercedes for us” — the Spirit of God, I realized and remembered, was at that very moment within me, praying alongside me, praying for me, praying on my behalf.

“With groanings that cannot be uttered” — the way the King James translators put it really resonates with me. “Inexpressible groanings” is of course completely, almost elegantly correct. But “inexpressible” is the kind of word that comes after-the-fact, a little further along in the process when we’ve been able to think things through a bit and find a few of the words that were elusive in the first waves of shock and pain. “Groanings that cannot be uttered” is how it feels in the moment: messy and raw. “Groanings” and “uttered” have an onomatopoetic nature: they sound like what they are. “Uttered” is downright guttural, going deep.

And God meets us there in that deep, unutterable place: “He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the saints.”

This passage is full of mystery, more than I can unpack tonight. More than I need to unpack in this moment.*

The one thing I want to remember tonight is that in all such moments—when things become unutterable and all we have are groans—God is not only there, He is helping us pray. He is hearing the groans and interpreting them for us (possibly into even deeper groans that echo from the deepest heart of things).

We are living in a groaning world. It’s easy to forget—on the good days—just how much hurt there is in the world. Then planes fly into towers, then war erupts in Syria or Ukraine, then a fire burns large swaths of Maui.

And we just. Don’t. Have. Words to pray. We groan deep unutterable groans of longing. For the world to be a safe place. For things to be set right.

Not having words is a hard place to be; uncomfortable, maybe even a bit frightening (if we let our inner child speak up with the truth of it!).

It’s a whole. Lot. Easier to throw ourselves into some kind of active cause than it is to sit in the ache for a bit.

To sit with the groaning and pray from that place is really really hard. And it’s also where God promises to meet us in a really deep and unutterable way.

I don’t know what’s on your heart this season, which one of the many daily fresh or ongoing tragedies and broken places of the world have your heart . . . another school shooting, another encounter with police goes bad, another older Asian man or woman is robbed and beaten . . . I know I don’t have to list them all, that I can’t list them all, that you don’t need me to list them all. Your groaning may be coming from something much much closer to home. And let’s not forget those that are still living with the unchangeable aftermath of one of these heart-wringing things. They still ache and groan, and if we’re honest, we struggle to find words to pray for them, too.

But maybe what you do need is a quiet invitation. To take a moment with whatever it is that’s breaking your heart and wringing groans from you — to press the pause button before the shock turns to the familiar and comfortingly powerful response of anger** and allow yourself to be wordless, allow those groans to escape from your lips or even just from your heart.^

You’re invited to let God meet you there.

Footnotes:

*All of Nature, Paul tells us in this passage, is groaning in longing for “the sons of God to be revealed.” The sons of God? Who are they? And why does all of Nature long for them? Paul explains that these sons of God are those humans who allow the gentle, unmerited yet unstinted grace of God to make them new; and through them, God will make the world new. It’s a mystery with eternal implications that I would love to have words to wrap around, and maybe one day I will, but The Bible Project really does a helpful (and concise!) job of laying this out in many of its thematic videos. Check this one out here: https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/image-of-god/

**There IS a place for anger, but our anger is often misplaced when we try to jump over this part or to skip it altogether. For some of us, the anger might come before the groaning, and sometimes the anger might be part of the groaning. All of this is ok and normal. I’m just asking us to not let the anger crowd out this important kind of prayer.

^Why?? you may be asking, Why would I want to sit in such a powerless place when what’s needed in this world is action and change?! What good does groaning do? Let me invite you to consider that the groaning is what connects us to the heart of things. And if our anger is going to have any good effect (as opposed to burning its own swaths across our lives), it really really needs to start from a place of connection.

If you would like to receive automatic notifications about newly-published posts, click the “follow” link at the bottom of the page for a place to enter your email address, if you are reading this on a mobile device. Or (if on a computer browser) look in the sidebar for the sign-up section where you can enter your email address.

And if you’d like to contribute to supporting my energy and time to write for this blog, you can go here for more information — https://joyousthirst.wordpress.com/support-this-blog/