An Easter Prayer

“I got pole position, Mom.”

That’s what I used to say when, as a young man, I wanted to be first in line for my mom’s prayers. Poll position is the place that the lead car gets, at the start of a race. We didn’t watch car races when I grew up. Nonetheless, I knew about the concept of strategic positioning and its relevance to Mom’s prayers. Because she sometimes fell asleep in the middle of those prayers.

Mom prayed every night. As a teenager, I would pass by my parents’ open bedroom door, on my way to my room, and see her perched against her pillow, cards in hand, silently reading, imploring, or doing whatever it is that she did inside herself when she prayed. Sometimes her eyes were closed. This meant that either she was praying fervently, meditating, or had drifted into slumber. It was hard to tell.

Thus placement in her prayer hierarchy was important. Otherwise, the session might be over before she got to you.

I am something of a “re-leaning” Catholic. There is a probably a better term for someone like me, someone raised Catholic who became sufficiently disaffected with the church to leave it, call himself “recovering”, change that description to “recovered”, and then later, some decades in fact, stutterstep back, hesitantly, towards organized religion. Let’s keep it simple with the word “re-leaning” – but understand that it refers to someone who let the failings of humans associated with religion obstruct a view into any value of spirituality associated with an organized belief in God, someone who is willing to be the subject of another’s prayers but doesn’t have enough of his own faith, or sufficient humility in and with that faith, to admit to praying for another.

Someone who nonetheless has always, privately, believed in the power of prayer.

Have you ever been prayed for? It’s a nice feeling. “You and your family are in my prayers.” People have sometimes said that to me. I used to smile, nod, and think how odd that sounded – even though it made me feel good. Now I smile, nod, and thank them. But I still don’t fully understand what it means, or how it is that they pray, to what God or being, in what sort of voice, or with what sort of heart.

I am opposed to proselytism. I believe that people should have freedom to pursue their own spiritual path. That perspective has led me, since my adolescence, to shy away from religion, to refrain from conversation about spirituality, and to maintain a ‘separation of church and state’ in my communications, work, and life. Last Easter season, during his final days, my father suggested to me that my approach, while understandable, may have become more of an imbalance than a separation. Had I become more state-inclined than soul-sensing? “Don’t be so afraid of religion,” he said, struggling for breath, oxygen tubing plugged into his nose. “Don’t be so closed to think you’ve got it all figured it.”

Dad may not have used those actual words. But that was, more or less, his message. He asked me to remain open. Because, and his face was filled with passion when he said this, he himself had not always been.

With age, comes uncertainty. I scrawled that self-conceived aphorism onto a post-it note many years back. The older I get the more I realize how much it is true, at least for me. I understand very little.

Today, almost a year after his death, I hear some of Dad’s final words, and I see the look in his eyes when he said them. I also picture Mom, propped against her pillow, eyes closed. I know how important I felt when I knew that Mom was praying for me.

So I offer them both, on this Easter Sunday, a simple prayer. I do it with as open a heart as possible. I do it as humbly as I know how.

And, Mom, you have pole position.