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Saint Paul states that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us “with inexpressible groanings". If we could find out for what and how the Holy Spirit prays in the hearts of believers, we would have discovered the secret of prayer itself. In fact, the Spirit which secretly prays for us without any clamor of words is the same which has unequivocally prayed in the Scriptures. He who has “inspired” the pages of the Scriptures, also inspired the prayers we read in the Scriptures.

If it is true that the Holy Spirit still speaks today in the Church and in our souls repeating, always in a different way, the same things it has spoken “by the prophets”, it is also true that He prays for us in the Church and in our souls, just like He taught us to pray in the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit does not have two different prayers. Therefore, the Bible must be our school of prayer, where we must learn how to “agree” with the Spirit and pray like He does.

What are the feelings of the biblical praying man? Let us try to find out through the prayer of God’s great friends: Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, the psalmists. The first striking thing about these “inspired” praying men is the great confidence and incredible boldness with which they communicate with God, with none of the sycophancy which men usually associate with the word “prayer”.

We know Abraham’s prayer to save Sodom and Gomorrah very well (cf. Gn 18:22). Abraham begins by saying: "Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?", as if to say: I can’t believe you are going to do anything like that! In each successive request for forgiveness, Abraham repeats: "Since I have thus dared to speak to my Lord!" His plea is “daring” and he realizes this himself. But the fact is that Abraham is “God’s friend" (Is 41:8) and amongst friends you know how far you can go.

Moses goes even further with his boldness. After his people crafted the golden calf, God tells Moses who is praying on the mountain: "Go down from here now, quickly, for your people whom you have brought out of Egypt have become depraved." Moses replies by saying: "They are, after all, your people and your heritage, whom you have brought out by your great power and with your outstretched arm." (cf. Dt 9:12-29; Ex 32:7-11). Rabbinic tradition has effectively grasped the underlying meaning of Moses’ words: "When this people is loyal to you, then it is ‘your’ people that you brought out of Egypt; when it is disloyal, then it becomes ‘my’ people that ‘I’ brought out of Egypt?". At this point, God resorts to the weapon of seduction; He hints at his servant that, once the rebel people is destroyed, He will make “a great nation” of him (Ex 32:10). Moses replies by resorting to some blackmail; he tells God: be careful, because if you destroy this people, everybody will say that You did so because you were not able to take them into the land you had promised them! "So the Lord relented in the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people" (cf. Ex 32:12; Dt 9:28).

Jeremiah even gets to the point of complaining openly and screams to God: "You duped me", and: "I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more!" (Jer 20:7-9). If we look at the psalms, we might even say that God constantly puts the most effective words in men’s mouths for them to complain with Him. The Psalter is a unique commingling of the most sublime praise and the most heartfelt lamentation. Often God is openly called into play: "Awake! Why do you sleep, O Lord?", "Where are your promises of old?", "Why, Lord, do you stand at a distance and pay no heed to these troubled times?", "You hand us over like sheep to be slaughtered!", "Do not be deaf to me!", "How long will you look on?"

How can we explain all this? Does God push men to irreverence since it is ultimately He who inspires and approves of this kind of prayer? The answer is: all this is possible because the creatural relationship between God and the biblical man is guaranteed. The biblical praying man is so intimately pervaded by the sense of God’s majesty and holiness, so totally subjected to Him, God is so much “God” for him that, based on this matter of fact, everything he does is safe. His favorite prayer, in trying times, is always the same: "The Rock – how faultless are his deeds, how right all his ways. A faithful God, without deceit, how just and upright he is. Yet basely has he been treated by his degenerate children" (cf. Dn 3:28; Dt 32:4). "You are just, Lord!": after these three or four words – God says – men can tell me whatever they want: I am disarmed!

Hence, the explanation is found in the hearts of these praying men. Right in the middle of his stormy prayers, Jeremiah reveals the secret which settles everything: "You, O Lord, know me; you see me, you have found that at heart I am with you!" (Jer 12:3). The Psalmists as well alternate their lamentations with similar expressions of absolute loyalty: "But God is the rock of my heart!" (Psa 73:26).

The quality of biblical prayer is also shown by the difference from the prayers of hypocrites. According to the prophets, the hypocrites’ mouths are all for God, but their hearts are far away from Him; instead, the hearts of true friends are all for God and their mouths, sometimes, are against Him, in the sense that they do not hide their bewilderment in front of His mysterious actions (cf. Jer 12:2; Is 29:13).

2. The Prayer of Jesus

However, if it is important to know how the Spirit has prayed in Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and the psalms, it is remarkably more important to know how Jesus prayed, because it is Jesus’ Spirit who now prays in us with inexpressible groanings. In Christ, that additional allegiance of the heart and the entire being to God is brought to perfection and, as we have seen, this is the biblical secret of prayer. The father would always do what the Son asked Him because He always did things that pleased His Father (cf. John 4:34; 11:42); Jesus was heard because of “his reverent submission, i.e.

for his filial obedience (cf. Heb 5:7).

Therefore the Word of God, which reached its apex in Christ’s life, teaches us that the most important thing in prayer is not what we say, but what we are; it is not what we have on our lips, but in our heart. It is not so much the object, but the subject. For Augustine as well, the main problem is not knowing “what to say when you pray”, quid ores, but “how you are when you pray", qualis ores. Prayers, like actions, “follow the way we are”. The novelty brought by the Holy Spirit, in a life of worship, is the fact that He reforms the worshiper’s way of “being”; He brings forth the new man, God’s friend; He takes his slavish heart filled with fears and self-interest to give him the heart of a son.

By descending within us, the Spirit not only teaches us how we should pray, but prays in us: the same as with the law, where He does not just tell us what to do, but acts with us. The Spirit does not give us a law of worship, but a grace of worship. Therefore, biblical prayer does not primarily come to us through exterior and analytical learning, since we try to imitate those attitudes we have seen in Abraham, Moses, Job and Jesus Himself (even if this will become necessary and required at a later stage), but comes to us by infusion, as a gift.

This is the incredible “good news” about Christian prayer! The principle itself of this new prayer comes to us and this principle is found in the fact that "God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, "Abba,Father!" (Gal 4:6). This means praying “in the Spirit” or “by the Spirit" (cf. Eph 6:18; Jgs 6:34).

In prayer, like in everything else, the Spirit does not “speak by Himself”, does not say new and different things; He simply revives and actualizes Jesus’ prayer in the hearts of believers. "He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you”, Jesus says about the Paraclete (John 16:14): He will take my prayer and give it to you. By virtue of this we can exclaim in all truth: "I am not the one praying anymore, but it is Jesus who prays in me!”. "Our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God” – wrote Augustine - “is the one who prays for us, in us and by us. He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our master and he is prayed by us as our God. Therefore, we recognize our voice in him and his voice in ourselves." ⁴.

The cry Abbài itself shows that it is Jesus, the only Son of God, who is praying inside us through the Holy Spirit. As a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit by Himself would never be able to address God by calling Him Father, because He was not “generated” but only “proceeds” from the Father.

⁴Augustine, Enarratìones in Psalmos 85, 1 : CCL 39, p. 1176.

According to an ancient author, when the Holy Spirit teaches us to cry out Abbài, "he behaves like a mother teaching her son to say “daddy” repeating that name with him until she gets him in the habit of calling his dad even in his sleep." ⁵. The mother could not address her spouse calling him “dad” because she is his wife and not his daughter; if she does so it is because she speaks on behalf of her child and identifies with him. Some people wondered why the Holy Spirit is not mentioned in “Our Father”; in ancient times there was even someone who tried to fill this gap by adding, after the invocation for our daily bread, the words we read in some codices: "may the Holy Spirit descend upon us and purify us". But it is easier to think that the Holy Spirit is not amongst the score of things we ask for, because He is the one who asks for things on our behalf. God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba,Father!" (Gal 4:6). It is the Holy Spirit who every time sings the “Our Father” in us; without him, anyone who cries "Abbà! " does so in vain.

3. The Trinitarian Scope of Christian Prayer

Therefore, it is the Holy Spirit who infuses the feeling of being God’s children in our hearts, by which we feel (and not just know!) that we are God’s children: "The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Rm 8:16). At times, this fundamental operation of the Spirit is performed in a sudden and intense way in a person’s life, and that is when we can contemplate all its magnificence. The soul is pervaded by a new light, in which God reveals Himself in a new way as Father. You really experience what God’s fatherhood is all about; your heart melts and you have the feeling of being born again, through this experience. A great confidence surges in your soul as well as a totally new awareness of God’s leniency which, at times, alternates with the equally powerful feeling of His infinite greatness, transcendence and holiness. God really appears as the “tremendous and fascinating mystery” which, at the same time, inspires utmost confidence and awe. In moments like these, the Christian man’s prayer become an expression of “deeply-felt gratitude".

When Saint Paul talks about the moment in which the Spirit breaks into the heart of the believer and makes him cry out: "Abbà Father!", he refers to this way of crying out loud, to this kind of impact on his entire being, to the highest degree. The same happened with Jesus when, "suddenly rejoicing in the Holy Spirit", He exclaimed: "I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth." (Lk 10:21).

However, you should not delude yourselves. Usually this vivid way of knowing the Father does not last long; and soon the time comes again when the believer says "Abbài", without “feeling” anything, and he keeps repeating it only upon Jesus’ word. That’s the time when we must remember that if that cry makes him who utters it happy, it makes the Father who listens to it even happier, since it comes from pure faith and submission.

⁵Diadochus of Photice, On Spiritual Perfection 61 (SCh 5 bis, p. 121).

So we are somewhat like Beethoven. After he became deaf, he kept writing beautiful symphonies without being able to enjoy the sound of even one single note. When his Ninth Symphony was performed in public for the first time, at the end of the final ode to joy, the audience burst out in a roaring applause and someone from the orchestra had to pull the maestro’s coat so that he would turn around and thank the crowd.

He did not enjoy anything about his music, but the audience went wild. His deafness, instead of dampening his music, made it even more sublime and this is what happens too when we don’t get any feeling from our prayer.

It is in this time of God’s “absence” and spiritual barrenness that we discover the importance of the Holy Spirit for our life of worship. We cannot see or hear Him, but He fills our words and our groans with a longing for God, humbleness and love, "and he who looks into our hearts knows the Spirit’s wishes”. We do not know them, but He sure does! Therefore, the Spirit becomes the strength of our “weak” prayer, the light of our dim prayer; in other words, the soul of our prayer. He truly “irrigates what is dry", as we say in the sequence dedicated to Him.

All this happens by faith. I only have to say or think: "Father, you gave me Jesus’ Spirit; therefore, since I am one with Jesus’ Spirit, I read this psalm, I celebrate this Holy Mass or I simply keep quiet in your presence. I want to give You that same glory and joy that Jesus would give You if it were Him in person praying You on this earth".

Hence, we can understand the unique character of Christian prayer, which makes it different from any other form of prayer. The B. Angela of Foligno said that praying means "to gather in unity and plunge our souls into the infinite which is God". Therefore, in prayer we see the achievement of the two movements which are proper to the human spirit: going deep in oneself and out of oneself.

Deep within every human being there is a point of unity and truth we call heart, conscience, deep self, center of personality and many other names. It is easier to know and be in touch with the whole outside world than it is to reach this inner center; just like it is easier for scientists to send probes on Mars and explore interplanetary space than it is to explore the core of the Earth, which is only a few miles away from us and no one has ever been able to reach. Prayer, when it is true, allows even the simplest people to achieve this goal: it gathers us in unity, it brings us in touch with our innermost self. Individuals are never really themselves when they pray.

However, as soon as human beings search their souls, they realize that they are not self-sufficient, they experience their limit and the need to go beyond it, to flee towards less confining spaces. Sometimes realizing what we really are can be a terrifying experience...Prayer is the only opportunity provided to us to go beyond our limits.

It allows us to "plunge our souls in the infinite which is God". People who experience this prayer, if only for a moment, feel entitled to use Leopardi’s words in the Infinito: "And to flounder in this sea is sweet to me".

Here we can see the difference between Christian prayer and other forms of prayer and meditation of different origin: yoga, transcendental meditation, enneagramm... These concentration techniques can be helpful in achieving the first of the two movements of prayer –delving deep into oneself -, but are useless to achieve the second movement, from our Selves to God. To make contact with a personal God, who is "totally Other" compared to the world, we as Christians believe that there is no other way if not through the Spirit of Him who said: "No one comes to the Father except through me".

4. “Grant What Thou Commandest!"

Because of all this, there is a secret vein of prayer in all of us. To describe this, the martyr Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote: "There is within me a water that liveth and speaketh, saying to me inwardly, Come to the Father!" ⁶. To what lengths do people go, in those countries plagued by drought, in order to reach an aquifer whenever there is a mere hint of its presence in the ground: people just keep digging until they reach it and bring water to the surface.

Some time ago I was in Africa myself, in a village where water had always being a precious element that women used to fetch from afar and carry home in simple vessels placed upon their heads. A missionary who had the gift of “feeling” the presence of water, said that supposedly there was an aquifer below the whole length of the village and people were digging a well. The night of my arrival, the last layer of dirt was being removed, after which people would realize whether there was any water or not. It was there! The inhabitants of the village thought this was a miracle and celebrated all night long, dancing by the sound of drums. Water was flowing beneath their homes and nobody knew! I thought this would be a perfect image to describe what happens to us with prayer. Some Christians even travel to the Far East to learn how to pray; they still haven’t realized that, being baptized, they have the source of prayer in themselves.

This inner vein of prayer, due to the presence of Christ’s Spirit in ourselves, not only vivifies petition prayer, but it also makes any other form of prayer alive and true: such as praise, spontaneous and liturgical prayer. But, mostly, I would say liturgical prayer. As a matter of fact, when we pray spontaneously, with our own words, the Spirit makes our prayer his own, but when we pray with the words of the Bible or the liturgy, we make the Spirit’s prayer our own, and this is the best guarantee. Also the silent prayer of contemplation and worship benefits greatly when it is done “in the Spirit”. This is what Jesus used to call “to worship the Father in Spirit and truth" (John 4:23).

The capability to pray "in the Spirit" is our great asset. Several Christians, even those who are truly committed, must face their helplessness when confronted by temptation and the impossibility of adjusting to the incredibly high requirements of evangelical morals; and sometimes they think that it is impossible to live a totally Christian life. In a way, they are right. In fact, we cannot avoid sin by ourselves: we need grace; but grace also – as we are taught – is given freely and there is no way to deserve it. What can we do, then: despair, give up? The reply comes from the Council of Trent: "God, by giving us grace, orders us to do what we can do and to ask for what we cannot do"⁷. When someone did all he could and did not succeed, at least he still has one possibility left: and that is praying and, if he has already prayed, pray again!

The difference between the old and new covenant is exactly this: in the law, God commands, telling men: “Do what I command!"; in grace, man asks, telling God: "Grant what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt.!" Once he discovered this secret, Saint Augustine, who until then had uselessly struggled to remain chaste, changed method and instead of fighting against his body, he started fighting with God; he said: "O God, Thou imposest, continency upon us. Grant what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt!" ⁸ And he achieved chastity!

5. Priests, Masters of Prayer

In Novo Millennio Ineunte, the pope states that holiness is a "gift" which then becomes a “task”⁹. The same must be said about prayer: it is a gift of grace by which the recipient is then obliged to correspond to and cultivate it. This is the topic I would like to discuss in the second part of my meditation: and that is, prayer as a primary task of priests.

If Christian communities must be "schools of prayer", then the priests who lead them must be “masters of prayer". On this point, however, I cannot hide my sadness. One day the apostles told Jesus: "Teach us how to pray". Nowadays many Christians silently make the same request to their priests and the Church: “Teach us how to pray!" Unfortunately many parishes are involved in too many activities; there are all kinds of initiatives going on, for young people, the elderly, sports associations, field trips, leisure time..., but nothing to entice or help people to pray. Often times those who feel this need for spirituality are led to look outside of Christ, in esoteric and oriental-style forms of spirituality whose intrinsic limitations for Christians I already emphasized.

⁶S. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Romans 7:2.

⁷DENZINGER-ScHòNMETZER, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 1536.

⁸augustine, Confessions, X, 29.

⁹NMI,30.

"Is it not one of the "signs of the times" that in today's world, despite widespread secularization, there is a widespread demand for spirituality, a demand which expresses itself in large part as a renewed need for prayer? Other religions, which are now widely present in ancient Christian lands, offer their own responses to this need, and sometimes they do so in appealing ways. But we who have received the grace of believing in Christ, the revealer of the Father and the Savior of the world, have a duty to show to what depths the relationship with Christ can lead."¹⁰.

No one can teach other people to pray if he is not a man of prayer himself, and here we get to the core issue. Let us recall what Peter said when the ministries were first distributed within the Christian community: "It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table...We shall devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word" (Acts 6: 2-4). Hence we derive that pastors can delegate to others anything, or almost anything, that has to do with the running of the community, except for prayer.

In this field, it can be very helpful for pastors to be surrounded by what Catherine of Siena used to call “a wall of prayer", made up of souls striving for the Church’s good¹¹. We have an example of this in the Acts of the Apostles. Peter and John are released by the Sanhedrin with the order not to speak in the name of Jesus. If they ignore this order they expose the entire community to reprisals, if they obey they betray Christ’s mandate. They don’t know what to do. It is the community’s prayer that allows them to solve this serious crisis. A woman starts praying; a man reads a psalm, another man has the gift of applying it to the present situation; a climate of intense faith is established; something like the Pentecost takes place again and the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, once again start proclaiming the message of salvation “with parrhesia” (cf. Acts 4: 23-31).

Usually we know two basic forms of prayer: liturgical prayer and private or personal prayer. Liturgical prayer involves the community, but is not spontaneous, in the sense that believers have to abide by pre-established words and sentences which are the same for every one. Personal prayer is spontaneous, but it does not involve the community. There is a third type of prayer which is spontaneous and involves the community at the same time: it is group prayer, or prayer groups. “Prayer groups", of different inspiration, are a sign of the times that we should welcome with gratitude, albeit always making sure that they act in a wholesome and humble way within the community. That is the kind of prayer Paul refers to when he writes to the Corinthians: "When you assemble, one has a psalm, another an instruction, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation.

¹⁰NMI,33.

¹¹ St. Catherine of Siena, Prayers, 76. Prayer and Pastoral Action.

Everything should be done for building up" (1Cor 14:26); this is what is implied in the following passage from the Letter to the Ephesians: "Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and praying to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father”. (Eph 5: 19-20).

There is one thing that mostly needs to be revived in the life of priests and that is the relationship between prayer and action. We have to change from a relationship of juxtaposition to one of subordination. Juxtaposition means that first you pray, and then you move on to pastoral action; subordination means that first you pray, and then you do what the Lord has shown in prayer! Apostles and saints did not simply pray before doing something; they prayed to learn what to do!

For Jesus, prayer and action were not two separate or juxtaposed things; He prayed during the night to implement His Father’s will as He had understood it during the day: "In those days he departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named apostles." (Lk 6:12-13).

If we really believe that God guides the Church with His Spirit and answers our prayers, we should take prayers before pastoral meetings very seriously, it is an important decision; we should not be happy with a hasty Hail Mary and sign of the cross to then move on to the agenda, as if this were the real serious business.

Sometimes it may seem that everything goes on as before and that no answers came out of our prayers, but it is not so. By praying we "put the question to God" (cf. Ex 18:19); we rid ourselves of any personal interest and ambition of deciding on our own, and God is given the possibility to take action, to make us understand His will. Whatever our decision is, it will be the right one in the eyes of God. Sometimes we see that the longer we pray for a specific problem, the shorter it takes to solve it.

Many priests can bear witness to the fact that their lives and ministry have changed ever since they decided to include an hour of personal prayer in their daily schedule, protecting this special time against everything and anything, almost like enclosing it in a barbed-wire fence.

In priestly life, a special place must be given to intercessory prayer. Jesus gives us the example with his “priestly prayer": "I pray for them, for the ones you have given me. [...] Keep them in your name. I do no task that you take them out of this world but that you keep them from the evil one. Consecrate them in truth. [...] I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word..." (cf. John 17:9). Jesus devotes a relatively short time to pray for his own self ("Father, give glory to your son!") than he does to pray for the others, essentially to intercede.

God is like a loving father who has the duty of punishing, but looks for all possible extenuating circumstances to avoid doing so and is happy, deep in his heart, when the culprit’s brothers try to convince him to be lenient. If these brotherly arms outstretched towards him are not there, he complains about it in the Scriptures: "He saw that there was no one, and was appalled there was none to intervene" (Is 59:16). Ezekiel conveys God’s lamentation to us: "I have searched amongst them for someone who could build a wall or stand in the breach before me to keep me from destroying the land: but I found no one" (Ez 22:30).

When, in prayer, we as priests feel there is a dispute between God and the people which was entrusted to us, we should not side with God, but with the people! So did Moses, to the extent of arguing that he wanted to be striked out with his people from the book God had written, the book of life (cf. Ex 32:32), and the Bible makes us understand that that is exactly what God wanted because “he relented in the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people".

When we are before the people, at that point we shall defend God’s rights with all our might. Only those who have defended the people before God and have carried the burden of its sin will have the right – and be bold enough – to cry out against it to defend God. When, walking down the mountain, Moses saw the people he had defended on the mountain, his wrath flared up: he crushed the golden calf, and scattered its dust on the water and made his people drink shouting: "Is the Lord to be thus repaid by you, o stupid and foolish people?" (cf. Ex 32:19; Dt 32:6).

I mentioned some of the “duties” priests have with respect to prayer, but I would not want the idea of duty to linger on, at the end of this reflection, as the main message, by which we might forget that it is – first and foremost – a gift. If we feel we are far from living up to this model of priests as “men of prayer”, we should never forget what Saint Paul has assured us of at the beginning: "The Holy Spirit comes to aid of our weakness". Comforted by these words, we can begin our prayer every day by saying: "Holy Spirit, come to the aid of my weakness. Make me pray. Pray in me, with inexpressible groanings. I say Amen, I say yes to everything you ask for me to the Father in the name of Jesus".

Universalis Presbyterorum Conventus

“Priests, formator of saints

The Pneumatological-Pauline Holiness of Priests

( Conference )

Malta