Mamihlapinatapai

"Mamilhapinatapai"--May 4, 2018

"Likewise 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.  And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." [Romans 8:26-27]

Even when our words fail, the living God does not let the line of communication be cut off.  God maintains our connection, bringing it to us and through us, by the Spirit.

That is to say, even when we pray boneheaded prayers, pray halfheartedly, or don't even bother to pray, the bridges between us and the living God are not burned... by God's own promise, and by the presence of the Spirit.

That is a really important idea for us to be clear about, because I think we religious folks sometimes get our focus in the wrong place when it comes to conversation about prayer and praying.  Sometimes folks get very passionately heated and indignantly fussy about how important it is to pray in public, how powerful prayer is, and how they believe things would be all around better if only more people would just pray.  (Praying about what is often left rather vague, but there is usually an air of resentment as though someone or something ominous were keeping them from praying, or as though more official public announcements about prayer were the same thing as praying itself.)   And while I am absolutely in favor of praying in whatever time or circumstance one finds oneself, I want us to be careful to keep the focus--like Paul's words here nudge us to do--on the God to whom we pray, moreso than on our attempts to find the right words.

And that is the real issue here: the reason prayer is important is not because our words have some innate power in and of themselves, or that God is like some kind of cosmic genie who must be appealed to in the right verbal formulas, or even that God is like some kind of slow moving bureaucracy who must have so many constituent letters and phone calls to pressure the divine into tackling this or that issue.  God is not a character from Peter Pan, and prayer is not like clapping and reciting, "I do believe in pixies!" enough to bring Tinker Bell back to life.  Nor is God like some kind of charitable foundation doling out grants only to those who write the best-sounding request proposals.  All of those tend to be our way of picturing prayer, oddly enough--that if we do enough of it, or if we pray with enough public officials around us, or if we find the right words, then the power of God will be unleashed that would otherwise have been inaccessible.

In a lot of ways, our default theology of prayer is often a lot like my kids' approach to electronic toys these days.  My kids understand that there are batteries in their toys, and when their toys stop working, their conclusion is usually phrased, "It's run out of batteries!"  Well, in a sense, that is a way of naming the issue, but of course, really batteries are simply a conduit for the real power--electricity.  The batteries are a form of chemically storing energy that will become electrical current--and in fact, that same electrical current can be poured back into dead batteries (if they are rechargeable) so that they can power a toy or a microphone or a clock or whatever again.  The batteries are a conduit, and even if the batteries themselves run out of power, power can be given them again so that they can work.

I think that's often our situation with prayer.  We treat prayer itself like it is a power--like speaking "In the name of Jesus, Amen," will authorize any blank check we write against God's bank account, and as though the importance in prayer is our words.  We sometimes think and talk as though God just wants to see more public displays of devotion--that if enough people will get in the town square and parade their piety, then God will start giving us our wish lists, regardless of whatever they are.  "If only we as a society prayed more," the spiel goes, "then God would make us prosperous and strong and safe."  It ends up sounding like God is powered by prayer, rather than the other way around.  It ends up sounding like God can't or won't act unless we get the words right, prayed loudly (or obnoxiously) enough, and with enough people, in the right public places.  And again, the trouble there is that it puts all the focus on me when the whole point of praying is to turn our attention and focus beyond myself to God and to the world and people whom God loves.  It's like we're so focused on the packaging, or the conduit, we have forgotten where the power really lies. 

Prayer is like a battery, in that sense--a conduit or vessel, but the real source of the power is something deeper still.  My kids' toys aren't really powered by "batteries"--they are powered by electricity.  And our needs are not met by "prayer" per se--they are powered by the God to whom we pray... and also the God who spurs our side of the conversation even when we don't pray rightly, don't know what to say, or can't bring forth words.

That's why when Paul is talking to the Romans here, the focus is not on our praying, but on the Spirit, who is not only "up there" on the "receiving" end of our prayer, but who is within us "down here" from the "sending" side of the conversation.  Paul says that God isn't thwarted or stopped when we don't know what to pray, or pray weakly, or, one assumes, selfishly, shortsightedly, or narrow-mindedly.  God isn't thwarted, because God's power is not contingent on our praying.  God's action is not dependent on us getting the words right first.  And God's presence is not conditional upon how many people show up for a religious photo-op in the public square, outside the schoolyard, or around the flagpole.  God doesn't wait for us to get our religious formulas right.  Paul says that even when we don't know how or what to pray, the Spirit takes up the work of carrying on the conversation even when our words have failed us or we no longer even know what we need or should say.

You and I know that from conversation with other people already--and prayer really is, at best, soul conversation. And you know from the people with whom you are closest that there are times when the words come, and then there are other times when no words are necessary, because both you and the other person know exactly what is on the other's heart. There are those times when words would almost be too clumsy and blunt a tool for the delicate work needed at the moment. They are times for what is called "Mamihlapinatapai" in the Yanghuan language spoken by some tribes in Chile; the concept has been translated by one brave linguist as meaning something like, "the silent acknowledgement and understanding between two people, who are both thinking the same thing."  You know what it is like to be in such sync with another person, or other people in different ways, perhaps, that you don't need to say the obvious thing, because you both already know it.  It turns out that words, as helpful as they are for much of the time, are not necessary for connection in every instance.  Words are conduits, to be sure, but the connection may be present without words, or even when the only words we would bring would be clumsy or imprecise.

If we can understand that kind of connection with the people who know our souls best in this life, then maybe we can get ourselves in the right frame of mind about praying, too.  In our closest friendships in this life, we know what it is to find the other person supplying the meaning even without our words--sometimes because we cannot form words through tears, or because the silence is so profound that no words are needed, or because the only thing that needs to be said is the admission, "There are no good words for this moment."  But if we can have a glimpse of what it is to be known so well and so fully like that in just the connection between one fellow human and another, then we can imagine that our connection with God might be at least as deep.  Maybe we will often find that words are helpful (what we usually think of as prayer), but maybe there are indeed times where words fail, where the Spirit picks up and carries the conversation--either through our tears or our joy or both at the same time--without needing us to find the right words first for the connection to be real. Maybe there are times when the living God creates "Mamihlapinatapai" with "sighs too deep for words."

And if that is the case, then our focus in prayer doesn't need to be nearly so much on whether we have uttered the correct magic words, or made a big enough public show of our piety, or believed hard enough when we asked for something.  In fact, the focus doesn't need to be on ourselves at all.  After all, at precisely the point where we start stuttering and staring at our feet self-consciously, the Spirit provides the meaning when our words fall apart.

Perhaps today, all that is needful is a bit of mamihlapinatapai between us and the living God.

Perhaps that is all that was ever needful... and God is the one who supplies it all along by the Spirit.

Lord God, our words fail, but you do not.  Speak, sigh, and pull us close to you even in the silence, by your Spirit.