Sighs may be all we have left to express ourselves

I was sitting just a short way from her when I saw her take a big breath and let out a bigger sigh.

“Mom, are you OK? What was that sigh about?”

“I don’t know. I just had to sigh.”

Mom’s sighs have been coming more frequently in recent days. It’s likely her physical discomfort from both the chemotherapy and her terminal cancer. She has been using oxygen for a little over a week now, not all the time, just on those occasions when breathing seems more difficult.

Then again, I come from a family of shallow breathers.

Mom, Dad and I were talking about that a few days ago. So maybe her sighs were just involuntary efforts to catch up on the deeper gulps of air her damaged lungs yearn for.

But I suspect there is also an explanation that goes too deep for words.

I immediately thought of that as we spoke of her sighs. I remembered what Paul said as he wrote about prayer to his church friends in Rome: “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.” (Romans 8:26)

My mom, dad and I have been people of strong faith for many years. But we are facing a battle with her cancer that we are not likely to win. So our faith in God and in our family and friends is pretty much all we have. No wonder we have been sighing a lot recently.

Sighing comes in very handy when we don’t know what to pray for. Which seems a frequent dilemma for us right now.

Maybe it is for you as well when your circumstances put you in a bind where words cannot be found to describe what you experience. Join me for a few minutes, and we’ll explore the challenge of inexpressible anguish and hope.

Many years ago, New Testament scholar C.H. Dodd reflected on Paul’s poetic affirmation that God’s spirit will speak for us with sighs to deep for words: “We cannot know our own real need; we cannot with our finite minds grasp God’s plan; in the last analysis all that we can bring to God is an inarticulate sigh which the Spirit will translate to God for us.” (“The Daily Bible Study,” Romans, William Barclay, p. 117)

We preachers and pastors find our professional reason for being in how we use words. So it is difficult to admit that there are times when words simply don’t do the job.

Ironically, I must use words to even faintly describe how inadequate words are at times of great grief and marvelous hope. We live beyond our words into the presence of God.

I don’t know if Paul was reflecting from any scriptural direction when he wrote of the sighs too deep for words. If he did, perhaps it was Psalm 38.

The psalm writer was filled with dread and anguish as he penned his spirit-poem. His song is a prayer for healing of some kind of sickness.

He also sought refuge from people who were tormenting him because of that sickness. It’s likely they all subscribed to the common attitude of their day that illness was a punishment for some kind of sin. With that attitude, then, they also assumed God was against the sick person.

In the midst of that soul-wrenching time, the psalm writer gives himself over to God: “I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart.” (Psalms 38:8)

I’m sure there are some persons who still fervently, and maybe fearfully, believe as the ancients believed that illness is punishment for sin. I also am sure that most of us understand there are very specific physiological and psychological reasons for the illnesses visited upon us, quite apart from sin.

Yet whatever we might believe about the origin of illness, we can all understand the weight of despair or helplessness. We can all understand the groans and sighs that simply defy our ability to explain them.

I hope we all can also trust that God is completely for us, especially in the midst of illness.

The good news is that we really don’t need to explain them to anyone — ourselves, our children or parents, or our closest friends. In fact, our futile efforts to explain away what we may never fully understand from this side of physical death may be the best reason to turn to another word that is overdescribed: “faith.”

Flannery O’Connor, in his “Letter to Louise Abbott,” bluntly but wisely said: “Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.”

O’Connor’s wisdom fits with a brief quote I found at the North Idaho Cancer Center the other day. Its words spoke to the unspeakable in me:

“When you come to the edge of all the light that you know, and you are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, Faith is knowing that one of two things will happen: There will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly.” (Jordan & Margaret Paul, “From Conflict to Caring.”)

When Mom or Dad or I need to express an inexpressible prayer of hope or anguish, of gratitude or grief, I hope we remember to sigh. I hope you do too.