Do You Pray?
I have a list of blog ideas that I can’t manage to write, somehow.
They all seem so feeble when the lead story in the New York Times just ran with a picture of two dead children lying next to their dead mother in a Ukrainian square.
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Every morning I open my eyes, open my phone, and open the news to make sure President Zelensky is still alive. I murmur an inarticulate incantation in his direction, as if I can will him the perseverance he needs to survive.
I expand that wordless surge of goodwill over the whole of Ukraine: to the mothers laboring underground while bombs boom overhead; To the fathers dancing on TikTok in fatigues as proof of life for their kids; To the grandmothers preparing molotov cocktails while whispering their own fervent spells and curses; To the boys compelled to murder their neighbors by a madman with too much power.
I picture my protection charm swelling across borders to find and console anyone facing oppression, loss, violence, or terror.
In my mind’s eye, I watch my prayer find its way here, to my own country, to safeguard your children and mine.
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In the blissful decades when I believed things easily, my internal monologue was an ongoing one-sided conversation with God.
Help me on this test.
Keep us safe on the road.
Thank you for this food.
Forgive me for my sins.
Take away the cancer.
Help us make ends meet.
My inherited religious tradition treats prayer like a promise: You are not, in fact, powerless. You bend the ear of God. Your small faith can move mountains and humble rulers and thwart the designs of the wicked. On top of all that, if you ask your Father for bread, he will not give you a stone.
It’s been 36 years, and I haven’t moved any mountains –– though I have always had my fill of bread, lived in comfort, survived sickness, and been surrounded by people who love me.
Even so. I am no longer content to accept my personal good fortune as evidence of divine kindness so long as there is a hopeless child weeping alone on a road somewhere, dragging his few toys behind him like so many stones.
I cannot pray like I once did, confident there is a God who hears and who will make things right. Yet every morning my tired, agnostic heart insists on returning to its old familiar posture of supplication.
I’m not the only one. At last count, some 76% of Americans pray with varying degrees of regularity; Apparently, even non-believers resort to prayer in times of crisis.
What is it we think we’re doing?
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I’m sitting in the dark, rooting through a stack of books for an answer to that very question. It’s late. My nine-year-old pads by, headed to the kitchen for her third glass of water.
“What are you working on?” she ventures, hoping to buy a few more minutes out of bed.
I allow it. “I’m trying to make sense of prayer. What do you think?”
She tilts her head, considering. “I think prayer is putting hope into words. It’s like sending a beacon of hope out into the world. I like to hear you pray because then I know what you’re hoping for, and maybe I can help.”
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French philosopher Simone Weil would have liked my daughter, probably. Weil says hope is a fundamentally human impulse, the thing that makes us sacred. Hope believes that good will be done to us in spite of all the evidence.
Our insistence on hope explains why it’s so unbearable to behold suffering: We don’t want to admit that the odds of a happy ending, for most of us, are actually pretty bad. But Weil says paying attention to the world as it is –– really paying attention –– is the same thing as prayer.
“The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle.
Love of neighbor…is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”
from Waiting For God
Thanks to Weil and my daughter, I have cobbled together a sort of framework for prayer in my own life: For a few excruciating moments each day, I will turn my whole heart toward those who suffer. I will pay attention as closely as I can stand –– because suffering is worse when no one sees, when no one acknowledges that you’re also holding out for a happy ending in spite of unbelievably shitty odds.
Then I will go out into the world and try to be the very good someone else is hoping for.
Pray for Ukraine, and then do what you can.