Pop 89: Pray Tell
By Madonna Hamel
Upon arriving at the cabin my sisters and I breath a sigh of relief. We are prepared to release the tensions and worries that have taken over our lives this year - a brother’s stroke, a father’s aging, a friend’s illness, a sibling’s shock, a child’s anxiety. We enter the cool cabin and are relieved to see comfortable bunks with thick mattresses and plenty of room to prepare meals. It was wise to pay the few extra dollars for a cabin instead of hauling tents to the campsite. It was an act of tenderness and maturity toward ourselves. We are learning to make life easy in the few places where ease is possible.
The cabin, in Cypress Hills, overlooks a small lake. For some reason, no one else is on the lake. So when we are not paddling or swimming, we are gazing out on what feels like our private resort, an entirely different experience than one we had a few years ago when two guys, obviously high on something, broke out into a fight in the tent site beside us. One of them pulled out a Bowie knife and threatened to eviscerate the other. Adrenaline pumped through my body as I urged my sisters to say or do nothing, to lay low until out of danger. Then I prayed like crazy.
We live in a world where security feels like the ultimate priority, and all actions are predicated on keeping ourselves safe and sound. But we have no control over the actions of others, especially the actions of campers in the site next to us. Then what? My reaction was an ancient one. It may unnerve some to know that Help! is a prayer. And even the desire to pray is a prayer.
I grew up in a tradition in which there exists a prayer for everything: from blessings on your family (including the sister you just hit with a croquet mallet) to prayers of thanks for a full meal on the table, to prayers beseeching St. Christopher for a safe journey in the station wagon on the way to Christmas at grandma’s. While we didn’t think about prayer per se, we didn’t think twice about praying.
As a child, we were given holy cards by the nuns the way other kids got birthday cards or trading cards. My favourite guardian angel holy card depicted two children crossing a swinging bridge high over a canyon with a flaxen-haired, amazonian-shouldered winged woman shepherding them to safety. You could never have enough angels, and we had them all - announcing, way-paving, protecting, singing, interpreting, revealing, wrestling, guiding, assisting, encouraging, bestowing.
The Talmud says: Over every blade of grass hovers an angel, whispering grow. And, once upon a time, it was common for a host to welcome both you and your friend, your guardian angel, to their supper table. You might find all of this silly and maybe even embarrassing, but having been raised on a diet of prayers and petitions to saints and angels, I am relieved to still feel connected to their mysterious world. A world far more preferable to a staid, dry, intellectualism which, when it cannot explain Mystery, often chooses to dismiss it rather than surrender into it.
I could fill my head with worrying thoughts that build upon themselves, increasing my fears and anxieties until they rule my world, turning a vague “what if” into an elaborate drama that grows with every worse-case scenario I fertilize it with. I can spend a ton of time and energy spotting the next catastrophe, building my case, when I could spend my time and energy being creative instead. I can spot and elaborate on and commiserate over a million perceived slights by others, or I can spot their beauty, their vulnerability, their awkwardness and their own suffering. It all depends on what I choose to see and hear and, on my own level of maturity.
Contemporary theologian Eugene Peterson once said he found the word “spirituality” cheap. It’s been overused. To be spiritual is simply to be mature, he says. To me, the means, there is nothing mature about posturing as a tough guy, full of bravado in times of fear and trouble. There is no heart, no courage, in bluster and ridicule. The word “courage,” after all, comes from the French for “heart.” Phrases like “who cares?” “outta my way,” “I got this!” “suck it up” and “tough it out” tighten my soul and constrict my heart; they do not welcome help from beyond my tight little reality. If you look in the bible, you will see there is no phrase: “God helps those who help themselves.” Only: “God helps those who ask.”
Who do I ask? Some of my siblings get amazing results going straight to our mom, who left her body behind in 2009 but whose presence is felt daily. I pray good old-fashioned Hail Marys on my grandmother’s rosary. My chair by the window in front of a Mary altar full of holy cards and candles and little written petitions faces the field where Carmen keeps her cows. Mornings, they pass by my window, and afternoons, they pass again, headed the other way home. So, while I don’t sit there all day - I stop throughout my day, especially when my mind wants to weave all kinds of terrible tales of destruction - I literally pray til the cows come home.
Prayer is a space wherein I can be 100% honest. I can tell the truth, find centre, be real. I get to express my fears and anger, as well as my doubts and thanks, then listen. Theologian Robert Barron tells a great story about a woman who, after days of watching her husband suffer in the hospital, approaches the statue of Mary standing outside the emergency doors and begins hurling dirt at it. Security tries to stop the woman, but a nun comes and stops them, saying: “Leave her be. She is praying.”