Fr. J. D. Ousley

This is no longer an unusual event. It may even have happened to you.

You arrive at the office as usual. You make calls, you go to meetings, you schedule appointments.

Then, at 4 o'clock, you are asked into your boss's office. She announces, with great regret, that you are being "let go."

Then, a security officer accompanies you back to your desk and you collect your personal items -- but leave any messages on your computer unread. Before five o'clock, you are walking out the doors of your company for the last time.

In the past year alone, I bet that I have heard a half-dozen versions of this not-very-nice story. Being suddenly "let go" isn't unusual, these days.

Yet those who lose their jobs are still hurt. They can't believe it happened to them.

Even when they have plenty of evidence that the layoffs weren't their fault, that they are the victims of economic uncertainty -- still, they feel they are failures.

And perhaps, more than anything else, the newly unemployed are thunderstruck. They don't know what to say.

From high school on, they have worked hard to succeed. The loss of a job is more than a loss of income -- it's a symptom of an even greater personal loss.

For their identity centered on their jobs. Now that they are unemployed, they don't know what to do -- and because they defined themselves by their work, they no longer know who they are.

Now such an experience of being speechless in circumstances beyond one's control is a good starting place to approach the difficult passage that we just heard from the writings of St. Paul. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul says this: "the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words."

Many commentators have struggled with what this text means. For me, Paul is speaking to human beings at the end of their ropes.

He is speaking to human beings with no place to turn -- people who "do not know how to pray" -- who are unable even speak the inner need they feel. The Spirit of God comes to such persons and offers a spiritual "sigh too deep for words."

And, on rare occasions, we may feel just this. We may sense that God's spirit is active in our souls. Our inarticulate attempts to express our unhappiness are replaced by the Spirit "praying in us."

Strange as it seems, God does work in this way. Before John Wesley founded the Methodist movement, he spent years in spiritual searching. Then, one evening, he went "very unwillingly," he says to a church in London.

In that church, the preacher was reading a passage from one of Martin Luther's works about faith in Christ. As Wesley heard the passage, he writes, "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation: and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

Now this deep prayer of the Spirit within us isn't the same as the prayers most of us offer most of the time. The prayer of the Spirit is offered "in extremis" -- in extreme conditions, when we have run out of ways to talk about our problems.

Yet it is a curious fact that prayer in the Spirit can be more powerful at such low times. Because we are weak, our egos don't get in the way. Our selfish demands move to the background. Our prayer is centered -- as it naturally should be -- on God not ourselves!

And, of course, it is at times when we are weak that we most need the Spirit. When we are weak, we need God's strength.

This philosophical idea of human weakness is more than a transient mood; it embraces who we really are. For all human beings are "weak" in the sense that we aren't perfect, and we aren't all-powerful, and we are in a world governed by forces beyond our control.

The most cheery humanist must admit to human limitations. This is who we are.

We cry out for the transcendent; we ask God to offer words for needs our lips cannot articulate.

Yet it happens that as the Spirit prays in us, we find our own voices. Our words reflect who we really are.

Often, people who are new to Christianity have trouble getting used to the language of prayer. The words they hear in formal church liturgy and the Bible and prayer books seem too formal or too intimate, too theological or too poetic. Whatever language they try, it's just not "them."

But when these new Christians remember that prayer is not only to God but with God, then they relax. Prayer isn't a test: there are no right answers. Whatever words come out, that's fine.

So if you feel angry, express your anger in your prayer. If you feel frustrated and no words seem to fit your mood, then just sit there and offer your silence to God.

Remain who you are. Let God fill the silence. Let the Spirit replace your speechlessness with sighs too deep for words.

In these extreme moments, you may even sense that as God helps you to speak, God is also directing the shaky, uncertain world in which you pray and which seems out of control.

In the text we heard earlier, St. Paul makes another extraordinary pronouncement. He says that "all things work together for good for those who love God."

Notice that Paul doesn't claim that all things are good for religious people. He says, rather, that "all things work together for good." The Spirit weaves together the strands of our lives, so that good can emerge from the midst of pain.

Take the devastating experience of losing your job. It may happen that what seems like a career-ending layoff will turn into a blessing. When we are forced to look at our real wishes and goals in life, we may end up in a much better place.

And whatever happens, we can be led to new ways to express the longings in our hearts.

We no longer worry about the words; we will be content to offer our hopes and our dreams, our failures and our disappointments -- and the Spirit will bring them to the Throne of Grace with a power and love beyond all human language.

And now unto that same God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be ascribed as is most justly due all might, majesty, power, dominion and praise, now and forever, Amen.