I Do Not Understand A Word Of It

Rafael has prayed this way for nineteen years and has never once known what he was saying.

That did not trouble him for the first fifteen. He did it in the mornings, in the car, sometimes at the sink, and it did what it did, and he did not examine it any more than he examined breathing.

Then somebody asked him, not unkindly, at a table, whether he thought it was really praying if he had no idea of the content.

He said something reasonable and the conversation moved on.

And then it did not move on for him. It has been four years.

What he has now is a quiet, persistent suspicion that he has been producing sound. That prayer is by definition a communication, that communication requires content, and that he has been standing in his kitchen for nineteen years making noises with no more meaning in them than the hum of the refrigerator.

He has not stopped. That is the strange part. He still does it most mornings, and it still does whatever it does, and he still feels afterwards the way he has always felt afterwards.

But he does it now with a small stone in his shoe. And the stone is the sentence: you do not know what you are saying.

He is fifty-two and he has not raised it with anybody, because the two people he would raise it with would each give him a different answer and both would be certain.

You may know that stone.

Maybe you also pray past your own words and have begun to doubt it counts. Maybe somebody asked you a reasonable question at a table. And maybe you have carried it four years without saying so.

The verse where he refuses to choose

The question you are carrying was asked in the first century, and it was asked by Paul, about himself, and he answers it in one sentence with a word in the middle that settles it.

What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also.1 Corinthians 14:15

Also.

Not instead of. Not having grown out of the first. Not the mature man's correction of the beginner's practice.

He describes both, in the same breath, as things he does, and the word joining them is the smallest and most ordinary word available. It is not a concession. It is an and.

And two verses earlier he has already said the thing you have been afraid of: my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful. He names the exact condition. He does not deny it. He agrees that the understanding gets nothing out of it.

And then he does it anyway, and reports doing it anyway, and puts it in a letter that has been read for two thousand years.

Which means the unfruitfulness of your understanding is a described feature of the thing rather than a discovery you have made about it, and the man who described it kept going.

And you are doing the thing exactly as it was described. The written word says plainly that the understanding is unfruitful and then says I will pray with the spirit, in the same passage, by the same man, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who carries that to a man with a stone in his shoe for four years.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word puts the Spirit interceding with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Spirit is the one who does the carrying rather than requiring you to supply the content.

Where the question came from

Now let me name the thing underneath the reasonable question, because it is a definition and you accepted it without inspecting it.

Prayer is communication. Communication requires content. Therefore content you cannot access is not prayer.

Every step there sounds obvious. And the second one is smuggled: it assumes the content has to be available to the person speaking for the communication to be occurring.

You would not apply that anywhere else. A child crying in the next room communicates something exact to a parent, and the child could not tell you what. A man who has lost his language after a stroke communicates to his wife across a room, and the transmission is real, and neither of them could write it down.

You are not the only party to this. There is a receiver, and the receiver is God, and what reaches Him is not limited to what you can render into Spanish or English on the way out.

And the content is not missing because you cannot read it. The word says He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, and the Spirit is the one making the intercession, and the knowing sits with the one receiving rather than with the one speaking.

And nothing about you is under review for nineteen years of it. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has kept praying with a stone in his shoe rather than stopping.

And I am not settling the argument at that table

Let me be plain about what I am not doing, because you have two people who would each be certain and I am not becoming a third.

Nothing here says you must have this. Nothing here says a person who does not have it is missing anything, or arrived later, or has less of the Spirit, because the Spirit is not distributed in that way and the chapter before this one asks do all speak with tongues in a form that expects the answer no.

And nothing here settles what should happen in a gathering, which is the actual subject of the chapter and is argued over by serious people who are not going to be resolved by an article.

What is available is only this: the man who wrote the sentence that worries you also wrote I will pray with the spirit, in the first person, in the future tense, as something he intended to keep doing.

And you are permitted to keep a practice the apostle kept. The word records the intention in the first person and joins it to the other with an ordinary conjunction, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than an argument you have to win at a table.