When All You Can Do Is Pray

(Wish I could sit next to Anne Lamott at dinner)

I spotted her once at the Good Earth Natural Foods parking lot in Fairfax, CA. I had long been a fan, had heard her speak, and still drew inspiration regularly from her seminal book on writing, Bird by Bird. Seeing her out in public in broad daylight gave me faith in the universe: “Ok. Not all is lost.” Random acts of awesomeness still happen.

Especially if you listen to the news and drink from it’s steady fountain of fear, you might be hydrating your cells with the insidious notion that Evil is winning. That’s what it wants you to think, after all. Discovering that Anne Lamott was buying groceries at her local food co-op gave me hope that day that maybe there was a lot more goodness roaming among us than I was typically aware of.

These days in New Haven, CT post my mother’s passing have felt oddly outside of time. In the first few weeks especially there were days when all I could do was stare out the window and pray. Which is also what I did at my mom’s bedside the night before she died. And the weeks before she died.

My mom had taught me to pray. Not just memorized prayers that you recite word for word, but really talking to God/ Spirit/ Love/ the Universe/ Life – whatever your name is for the vastness that we all apparently come from and return to. She had credited her grandfather for teaching her how to pray. Prayer can put us in direct communication with the lineage of those who taught us to pray. Praying can be an act of communion with them.

In her super pragmatic and characteristically funny book Help, Thanks, Wow, Anne Lamott describes why admitting you pray is a radical act in our culture:

I was raised to believe that people who prayed were ignorant. It was voodoo, asking an invisible old man to intervene, God as Santa Claus. God was the reason for most of the large-scale suffering in history, like the Crusades and the Inquisition. Therefore to pray was to throw your lot in with Genghis Khan and Torquemada (which was the name of our huge orange cat) and with snake handlers, instead of beautiful John Coltrane, William Blake, Billie Holiday. My parents worshipped at the church of The New York Times, and we bowed down before our antique hi-fi cabinet, which held the Ark of the Covenant – Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk albums.

So, to recap, my parents, who were too hip and intellectual to pray, worshipped mostly mentally ill junkies. Our best family friends drank and one-upped one another trashing common enemies, like Richard Nixon and Christians.

Too hip and intellectual to pray. Hm. Today’s dinner parties are just as bad. We would just substitute those common enemies with contemporary disagreeables. Nonetheless, one-dimensionality is still hip.

In her book Lamott goes on to describe the three basic categories of prayer: 1. asking for help; 2. giving thanks; 3. expressing awe. When the world becomes too much, we often start with that first category in a plea something like: Yikes. Please help. Admitting we’re hoping that something, anything beyond ourselves might be listening, Lamott says we “enter the paradox of not going limp and not feeling so hopeless that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own – or other people’s – higher powers.”

If instead of putting our faith in political figures and heads of business we can turn to a sunset and speak to it as if it were listening, we might better resource ourselves for the collective evolution that lies ahead. Even if we just don’t know what or who the heck we’re reaching out to.

If you told me you had said to God, ‘It is all hopeless, and I don’t have a clue if You exist, but I could use a hand,’ it would almost bring tears to my eyes, tears of pride in you for the courage it takes to get real – really real. It would make me want to sit next to you at the dinner table.

Sign me up! I want to sit next to Anne Lamott at the dinner table!

Something I really got these past few months is that “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.” I discovered that suffering is pain without prayer. On the other hand, staying in prayer while in pain, allows for evolution.

Next time you consume a headline that feels like a gut punch, maybe try looking out the window, picking one part of the natural landscape around you and talking to it honestly like you would a dear friend: “This makes me so sad… Can you help?…” Then open yourself, and listen for a response.

You don’t have to call it prayer. I won’t tell anyone.