full-groan

 

Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate); Van Gogh

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Romans 8:26

Choking tightness round the heart, 
Unsure how or where to start -
A groan, a moan, a wordless plea

Say what words cannot quite hold;
Meaning beyond verbal modes. 
For words contain and drop like seeds 

Holding full-grown tree/wood/world - 
(Though first must embryo uncurl 
And break through shell by force of need

For sunlight, water, earth, and air,
Driving it it knows not where. 
Up and down and out and freed

From hard and sealed protective shells, 
It grows to heaven, deepens, swells.) 
- in closed potentiality.

But when the earth was formed and filled 
No seeds were laid in earth well-tilled; 
Eden was made with trees full-grown.

The new winds filled the spreading limbs 
With wordless songs sung unto Him 
Who is the Word words can't contain. 

He sounds men's depths (by man, unknown) 
And gives them voice (and voice alone) 
That all their gutting grief speaks plain. 

When words like seeds away are blown
or dropped like heavy pits of stone - 
A groan, a moan, a wordless plea,
A resonance of need intones
- 
Too deep for words are prayers' full-groan.  

 "...in most cases prayer consists more in groaning than in speaking, in tears rather than in words. But He sets our tears in His sight, and our groaning is not hidden from Him who made all things by the word, and does not need human words."

St. Augustine, Letter 130

 “…it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high’…, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it perhaps, as he sits so quietly in the corner of his hearth. At the same time something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms. ... This is far from all theology—simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to.”

Van Gogh, on his lithograph of “Sorrowing Old Man”
To Theo van Gogh. The Hague, Sunday, 26 and Monday, 27 November 1882.