the truth. The last time she’d spoken, she asked me about prayer, and so I was willing to forgo the whole truth if it meant she might speak again. Maybe religion was the only well that would draw water.
* * *
—
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing. I used to worry over that scripture when I was a child. “Is it possible?” I asked my mother. “To pray without ceasing?”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
So, I did. My first attempts involved getting down on my knees at the foot of the bed. I started by listing everything I was thankful for. My family, my friends, my blue bicycle, ice cream sandwiches, Buddy the dog. I looked up and not even a minute had passed. I kept listing, people I thought God should work on a little more, animals that I thought God had gotten right and a few that I thought he’d gotten wrong. Before long, I got distracted and my mind wandered so far off that I found that instead of praying, I was thinking about what had happened on my favorite television show the night before.
“I don’t think it’s possible,” I reported back to my mother.
She was in the kitchen, straining used oil into an empty bottle. She had a habit of sticking her tongue out when she poured things. Years later, in the bathroom pouring soap into a dispenser, I’d caught myself in the mirror making that same face and it had startled me. The thing I feared, becoming my mother, was happening, physically, in spite of myself.
“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” she said.
“Matthew 19:26.”
My whole life, my mother had been quizzing me on Bible verses. Sometimes the verses were obscure, so obscure that I’m sure she looked them up moments before asking me, but I prided myself on getting them right. Now, from time to time, a verse will come to me at the oddest moments. I’ll be at a gas pump or walking through the halls of a department store and a voice will say, Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him! And I’ll reply, Psalms 34:8.
“What is prayer?” my mother asked.
This question stumped me then, stumps me still. I stood there, staring at my mother, waiting for her to give me the answers. Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. I spent the summer after my eighth birthday reading my Bible cover to cover, a feat that even my mother admitted she had never done. I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.
“If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer,” my mother said. “Instead of trying to pray all day, live your life as prayer.”
I was disappointed by her answer; she could see it in my face. She said, “If you find it difficult to pray, why don’t you try writing to God instead? Remember, everything we do is prayer. God will read what you write, and he will answer your writing like prayers. From your pen to God’s ear.”
Later that night, I would write my first journal entry, and get hooked on how clearheaded I felt, how even just the act of writing to God made me feel like he was there, reading, listening. He was there in everything, so why couldn’t prayer be a life lived? I watched my mother continue to pour used oil through the sieve. I watched the sieve catch the hardened, charred bits of food left over from the day’s cooking. I watched my mother’s tongue peek out from the corner of her lip, a snail slipping out of its shell. Was this pouring prayer?
I slurped the last sip of soup. My mother didn’t stir; she didn’t turn. I watched the slope of her back rise and fall, rise and fall. Was this prayer?
11
Dear God,
Buzz and I raced to the car after church today. He won, but he said I’m getting faster. He better watch out. Next time I’ll beat him.
Dear God,
Please bless