Thinking it over ...Without a prayer: Part I By Félix Alfonso Peña I’ve known a number of people who didn’t have a prayer. They still don’t, as far as I know, but it doesn’t bother them. That’s in part because not having a prayer isn’t something that was forced on them. It wasn’t really their choice, either. It’s just the way those people are. I know, because I’m one of them. I didn’t choose to not have a prayer. I just realized one day that I was all out of them. Having grown up Roman Catholic, my childhood and youth were filled with prayers: original ones and a great many prefabricated ones printed in our catechism books and missals, liberally laced with thees, thous, thy, thines and arts. Those written out for us were for specific events and moments, either on the church calendar or in our own cycle of sin, repentance, contrition, forgiveness and return to grace. As such, they were full of subtle pieties that we could scarcely be expected to understand. But it was enough to obey and faithfully repeat them, thus showing our faith not just in God, but also in the men who brokered and lived from our relationship with the divine. Because I thought it would be rude and selfish of me to pester the Almighty with trivial, personal wishes such as French fries and barbecued brisket for supper, or a visit from a favorite uncle, the original ones I gave prayerful voice to sprang from my own deep-seated, urgent wants. The earliest original prayer that comes to mind is the one that my parents should divorce. Kneeling at mass in the gymnasium at St. Joseph’s Academy school for boys in Laredo, Texas, it occurred to me that I could pray for this wonderful thing called divorce, which if granted would remove a brutal and fearsome man from my life and allow me, my mother and my sister to live without the fear of violent death that dangled over us, held back only by the volatile thread of my father’s whims. Being about eight years old and very unsophisticated, I thought of this divorce as a family thing, separating us from my father. I wanted it for us, not just for me. Then one of the Marist brothers who taught us said something during a religion class about the evils of divorce. That hit my clarity of thought like a hurled rock striking a windshield. I felt shattered. I wanted to be safe, but the only way to safety was through the sin of divorce, for which I had been praying. I struggled, I wondered, I anguished, and eventually I decided to keep praying for a divorce. I can’t recall the rhetorical particulars. Perhaps I opted to let God sort it out. The worst he could do is say no, right? And if wanting this divorce was a sin, God’s hell was a lot farther away than the one I was living in, so it’s safe to say I made a strategic decision in favor of deferred castigation. Whether that decision involved lying to myself about God’s will is beyond me. Of course, I continued making strategic decisions about prayer and want. I prayed for forgiveness when the anger and fear writhing inside me lashed out through my fists. I prayed for love to replace the bitterness. I prayed for the health of people I loved. I prayed that my father’s anger would yield to love. And I prayed for forgiveness often as I went through adolescence, when the touch of a girl or woman’s arm, a whiff of her scent, or just the casual touch of her gaze was an intoxicating, driving force over which I had no power. But life was a swirl of passion and other powerful emotions that blinded me and threw me about like so much chaff. Eventually, I learned that the granting of prayers is haphazard at best, always unpredictable, always rationalized by the recipient. And one day, standing in a chapel in Fort Bliss, Texas, around All Souls’ Day, I bowed my head, reached down for a prayer and found none. The padre and my fellow basic trainees dutifully intoned the words of a prayer written out on the pages of a book lying open in my hands, but I felt nothing but the nasty taste of hypocrisy on my tongue when I uttered those words. So I stopped. I no longer had a prayer. I felt a sense of loss overshadowed by an unsettling sense of excitement and wariness, the feeling one gets when the familiar ends and something brand new begins, when comfort gives way to surprises. I also felt relief, because with every prayer had come a suspenseful period of waiting for it to be answered. With every unanswered prayer, and there were many, came the need to justify that lack of response to my petition. I doubted myself, doubted God, and doubt brings no comfort. Even when a prayer was answered, I doubted myself and God, because I had learned that people are not so much rational as rationalizers. Was I using coincidence to impose my vanity on the Cosmos? Why was this prayer answered? I was no more worthy than when I had prayed the unanswered ones. What was the plan? Who was qualified to answer my questions? Was there a sucker punch waiting? Standing with head bowed among the still, orderly undulations of olive drab fatigues capped by closely clipped heads in the chapel at Fort Bliss, I quietly closed the book and shut my mouth. And I lived on, without a prayer. |