The Table Video

Theologian Miroslav Volf and CCT Director Evan Rosa discuss the role of praying in the face of pain and adversity. The disorientation induced by pain necessitates a unique form of prayer. Dr. Volf points to the words of the Apostle Paul, who claims that the Spirit intercedes when we do not know what to pray, as an example of what Christian prayer might look like in the midst of suffering.

Transcript:

What I find so provocative about this is the kind of virtue of unknowing. The kind of virtue that it looks like is paradoxical, right? Socrates’ wisdom being that he knew he wasn’t wise.

Yeah, yeah.

Knowing only what we don’t know. But this kind of speaks to kind of a rightful and fitting place, our place as creatures. Our creatureliness, as in relation to our creator. And I wanna come back and perhaps close with some thoughts again about the groanings of the spirit as a response. So if, so in the wake of kind of silence, the deafening silence of unknowing in the wake of suffering. There is a space for prayer still, but it’s a different kind of prayer.

Yeah, that’s Paul’s point when he says we don’t know how to pray. Because prayer is if it’s intercessory, well, you cannot specify.

Evan: Petitionary?

You order the Christmas gift.

Take one for me–

From God.

One of those, please.

Yeah, and I want this kind of edition of whatever it is.

Evan: Yeah, ordering God around.

And exactly, right? So that’s generally what we tend to do. But kind of a sense of stepping back, and understanding that I don’t quite know what it is that will make for fulfillment of my life but my life is in the hand of someone who hears the groans, who groans together with me. And who somehow transforms my groaning into something that can be my own future in fact. That is probably better for me than what I at this point were able to imagine it to be.

What I find so wonderful about this is that it kind of occupies that space between knowledge and agency.

Yeah, yeah.

This kind of prayer, the prayers of the spirit, which come forth in groanings and longings and unfulfilled desires kind of fills that personal space that somewhere between knowledge and somewhere between actions and somewhere between feeling. But it’s almost uniquely divine, the kind of things that come through. It makes sense of our, I think our deep intuition, not just a Christian intuition, but a human intuition that sometimes the only thing to do in response to suffering is to be silent.

Right, right, right. And then kind of there’s silence that envelopes a longing, right? It’s not a dumb silence fully, right? It’s all tense fulfilled with longing and often a groaning. A sense that this is silence of things as they ought not be.

It feels like unactualized potential.

Yeah, something like that.

It’s like some tension that just is stirring below the surface and if only it could meet its end, and there’d some kind of resolution, but it feels so far.

Yeah, and I think that kind of, to be in that darkness especially when we are undone by heavy suffering, it’s a huge challenge. How does one do that? I mean, in life of Christ you see that, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In a sense, it kind of expresses the fundamental trust that was perceived to have been betrayed at the very last hour of life. And yet what happens after he just says My God, my God why have you forsaken me? Forsaken is the last word, the curtain in the temple splits into two, the graves open.

The response of God, I mean, I put it sometimes this way, if you address a person, polite person will respond. God doesn’t say a thing. But the way God responds is the temple tears, the graves open. Here, you’ve got this intrusion of the transformative event.

Yeah, there’s almost like an ontological response.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

And that is something that is like, maybe expressed in the tearing of the temple and the graves opening but if there’s some like deep spiritual reality that has just been exploded.

In a sense, it’s a sight of a new world emerging.

Yeah, something new.

Yeah.

Miroslav, thank you so much for your time today. This is just rich and I’m looking forward to your future work. Please keep at it.

Always good to be here with you, have conversations with you, that’s wonderful we can collaborate.

Thank you so much.