Monday, July 9, 2018

Prayers of the People

I prayed and prayed and prayed again, until the tears ran dry. Quietly in the back pew of the church muttering through a feeble "hear our prayers" at the prompting of others, hardly able to hear the words I knew by rote.

Yearning for healing for loved ones in pain. Aching for scared children of sick parents. For the friend diving into the abyss of a medical treatment with slim odds of success. For the heaviness of a world I could not fix. For my weakness and fear as the future's maw yawned indignantly at the plight of the weakest and the strongest alike. I prayed without intention or direction underneath a familiar script. 

Hear my prayer!

The world didn't change. No miracles rent the fabric of my muslin reality. No fuzzy-bearded deity alit from cumuli to banish inequities of the world in acquiescence to my plaintive cadging. No devils offered bargains. 

Hear whose prayers? 

Instead, I prayed and I held my yearning. I clasped my pain, though it burnt. I held my fear and vulnerability and that crushing helplessness of a world that doesn't always play "fair." Submerging through it into the love and happiness that had made the pain and loss smart so deeply. The hugs. The laughter. The kisses never shared. The memories formed and unformed. They dragged me down, but I held tighter.
Hear our prayer? Where? What?
I began to hear the echoes of laughter. Of tears. First and last breaths mingling with that raw morning reek. Bodies simply being in the same space, atoms fizzing in and out of our corporeal limits.
As I plunged further at dizzying speed, some pit in my stomach brushed a spot beyond myself. My body cringed and crackled, stinging as a a force rushed into those broken spots. I ached. More tears squeezed through. 

And *nobody* was healed. No children stopped crying.

Hear-ah-prayer? 

Behind me a woman softly sniffled in another's arms. They prayed too. Pewed people hovered with heads bowed or heads raised or heads slightly cocked. Thumbing their bulletins or closing their eyes. Practicing their next call and response, or stumbling over another. Hear our prayer? 

Muttering and chanting. As others uttered their personal supplications, some smiled. Some frowned. Some scratched their wrists and fingered their watches. But we all prayed in stichomythic strides, and the echoes resounded from our depths.

And the world outside remained the same. 

We prayed to ourselves in our plentiful solitudes. Orisons surging beyond the text overlying . Waves of supplication washing over each other, a briny tide tugging us along. 

No crises averted. No buildings reassembled from the ashes. No graves re-opened. 

We prayed for ourselves but then for each other and then for us, as our selves intermingled. The yearning and the fears and the love all vibrated through the silent breaths between prayers. That tiny divine seed surging through a nauseous nerve in our bellies. It seeped through the cracks. It pooled in the air between us. 

And no cancers were cured. No injustices righted . Not a single child reunited with an anxious parent.
 
We prayed for ourselves, ever more the deeper selves present in all things. We prayed for "us" the community. And for "us" the people. And for "us" the world. And we stopped ignoring the words even as the words melted away. And we prayed for all things. We saw that little something that tickled and ached inside of us spewing light from every existence. Ever deeper into the sufferings and joys until the two poles were an indistinguishable everything. Ever further into the realm of love. 

I prayed. We prayed. We heard our prayers with our fullselves until the deepest unspoken outshouted the scripted and mechanical. 

We heard our prayers. 

And the world didn't change. But we did. 

Our prayers didn't change the world. But we might.

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