October 26, 2021
by Tom Shanahan, S.J.
Creighton University's Athletic Department
click here for photo and information about the writer

To Groan or not to Groan

I have found myself long attracted to the eighth chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.  It began with a fascination with the word “groaning” applied to the Holy Spirit.  (“The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”)  What are those groanings and how do they affect us as we become award of them? 

But it’s not only the Holy Spirit groaning on our behalf.  Both we ourselves and the whole of creation also groans.  So, the plot thickens! How do we deal with this unusual word applied to us, to creation, and to God? And how does it affect the relationship between God and ourselves?

The word connotes deep and full experience of longing for engagement with and for something. In the Romans letter it seems to express something further and even deeper.  I’m sure that at some point in my life I groaned, but it is difficult to speculate about it because of its profundity.

However difficult to understand, St. Paul convinces me of how important it is to discover the working of God with us who seek to discover God interacting with us.

I recall an incident that seems to shed some light on what Romans is getting at with the reference to groaning.  I was asked to administer the Sacrament of the Sick to a friend’s brother.  He was hospitalized and on his last days.  He had not communicated verbally with me since I arrived at his bed side, but then somewhere in the midst of words and actions in the sacrament, he began to sob.  It felt to me that it was coming at the depth of his soul.

It was astonishing to hear.  My sense was that the Holy Spirit was touching him at an incredibly profound level in his last hours.  Clearly it was his experience, but it communicated itself to me on a deep level as well.  I considered how privileged I was to be there in his presence as he experienced God’s love. 

Am I right about that interpretation?  I do not know - maybe or maybe not.  But being right or wrong seems not the real question here. All I can say is that the Lord touched me profoundly at that moment; and I was (and still am) drawn to gratitude by it. God’s graciousness and healing was displayed to me by the man’s experience however that came to him.
So, my attraction to St. Paul’s word groaning continues.  I am even more attracted to it since the gift that day showed me profound healing power of the Sacrament of the Sick.  How good is God to us?  We’ll only know faintly, I suspect, but even in its faintness it is powerful and abiding in its Godliness.