Soul Prayer
I remember the days of old; I meditate on all Your doing; I muse on the work of Your hands Psalm 143:5
Declare – Prayer proclaims. In praise, in cries, in pleas, in exultation, we have discovered that most prayer in the Hebrew world is vocalized. Prayer is the personal, announced testimony of the grace of God. Once that concept is firmly locked in place, then we discover another layer of prayer – the prayer of silent speech.
This verse uses the Hebrew verb hagah. The same verb is found in the introduction to the sefer tehillim (the Psalms). In Psalm 1:2, the writer says that the righteous man “meditates on the Law day and night.” It has the same meaning in Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 63:6. But in many Psalms and the book of Isaiah, hagah describes a different kind of sound. In Isaiah 8:19, 16:7, 31:4 and 38:14, hagah describes the mutterings of witches, the moans of judgment, growl of a lion and the cooing of doves. Hagah is not the sound of words, carefully articulated in proper grammar and syntax. Hagah is the sound of the human spirit when words fail. And when hagah is applied to prayer, we are transported from our carefully constructed containers of organized observation into a world where the mystery of God overshadows us. We utter sounds that never found their way into dictionaries. We groan our troubles, project our delight and move lips to our deepest thoughts. We come in contact with something Paul describes in Romans: ” but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words.”
Hannah knew this kind of prayer. So overwhelmed with sorrow, she could not vocalize her agony. David knew this kind of prayer. He must have experienced it when he prayed for the life of his unborn child after the adultery with Bathsheba. He certainly wrote about it in many psalms.
Hagah is not the common verb for speaking. There are many other choices in Hebrew if I wish only to describe intelligible, audible sound. Hagah implies something else. It is the language of the soul. It may be completely silent, inarticulate noise or actual speech, but it is always the vocabulary of a soul consumed with the things of God.
Hebrew prayer is incomplete without hagah. Meditation is not sufficient to describe the range of hagah prayer. But consecration is. When we reach the end of ourselves, when there is nothing left of human being to fill the chasm of our hearts, then we are ready for the abyss of hagah where God can speak His own language of love in words we cannot comprehend. “How I delight to meditate on You, O Lord!”
Leave some room for hagah.
