I Don't Know How to Pray

TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNING: Reference/Mention of Self-Harm

I’m sitting in a pew in the very back of Goucher’s chapel. I don’t know why I felt the need to come here, but I did. I left the cluttered, loud dining hall and came to the silent, air- conditioned chapel. I was both surprised and unsurprised to find it unlocked.

            My church at home has stained glass windows with biblical pictures in them. Jesus as a shepherd, Mary holding her infant child; the usual. The stained-glass windows in this chapel are just various shades of blue. They match the blue galaxy skirt I’ve worn today to show off how quirky I can be. I don’t know why that matters, but it sticks out to me.

            There is a large wooden cross at the front of the chapel, with Jesus’ body etched slightly into it, to the point where I hadn’t even realized it was there until I really studied it. There is no humanistic body of Jesus hanging from the cross, ribcage protruding and scratches evident from days of starvation and torture. This is a simple chapel. And in the silence, I lean forward, rest my arms on the back of the pew in front of me, and bow my head.

            But I don’t know how to pray.

            I know how to recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed and even the longer Nicene Creed, and I know how to read the part of the service program designated for the “congregation;” but I don’t know how to pray by myself. Do I start with a Hail Mary? Does the Father/Son/Holy Spirit movement come before I’ve started or once I’ve finished? What do I even pray for?

            My step-mom, Shelley, tells me she’s prayed on the train commute to work, in bed when she wakes up, and sometimes just when she’s walking around. I’ve sat and watched as my dad, holding his head in his hands, prays after receiving the Communion. His eyes are closed, his focus is that of someone in a deep meditative state; what does he pray for?

            Asking what people pray for, to me, is like asking what they wish for when they blow out their birthday candles. You just don’t do it. Praying puts you at your most vulnerable. You are asking for things that you feel only God can grant you.

            But what can God grant you? What are you allowed to ask for?

            I used to ask for strength. I used to ask for strength and part of the reason I started to push back against Faith is the fact that I never felt any new strength. I remember, as a teenager, kneeling at the side of my bed with my hands clasped over my bowed head begging God to help me, and then two days later I was pulling scissors across my wrist. So maybe I wasn’t supposed to ask for strength?

            So I prayed for my mom and for our relationship. And it took years and distance—like, I moved away to college and we didn’t see each other for large chunks of time—before we made any progress, and even then, I am still reminded again and again that the progress is nothing but mere baby steps. So maybe I wasn’t supposed to ask God to fix my relationship with her.

            So what do I pray for? How do I pray? What, even, is prayer?

            Everything is louder in an empty chapel. Things are just naturally louder in empty rooms, I think, but they are even louder in empty churches. Every time my ring accidentally knocks into the wooden benches, it echoes so loudly that I’m convinced someone is going to come out and yell at me, even though, as far as I can tell, I am alone in the building.

            Today is different. I’m not here to pray. There’s a familiarity to walking into the building because I’ve been here once before, and once before is enough to feel familiar in a church. So instead of sitting rigidly in the pew facing the cross, I am tucked into the corner, so I can lean on the edge and put my feet up. Well, my legs. I’m keeping my feet off of the wood. My shoes are dirty, and dirty shoes don’t go on the furniture; especially not in God’s house.

            My first visit to the chapel wasn’t really to pray, either. I just wanted to see what it was like. My home church keeps its doors locked throughout the day, so I can’t sit in its pews, hoping for inspiration. I mean, I could probably ask to be allowed in, since people are in the offices, but I haven’t yet tried. I don’t want to tell my pastors why I want to write in the church. Why I need to write in the church.

            People used to crowd around Jesus when he would be in town, begging for his touch or his blessing so that they may be cured of all ills, or be forgiven of all sin. In Luke 5:17-39, a paralytic man was lowered by his friends through the roof of a building so that he may see Jesus, because he was unable to make it through the crowd. In Mark 5:25-34, a woman who had been deemed “unclean” by society due to her bleeding pushed through a crowd and simply touched his clothes, knowing that she was going against societal rules about touching men whom she didn’t know; but she also knew that touching Jesus’ clothing would heal her. And, according to Jesus, by faith, she was healed.

            On first hearing these stories I thought about how selfish the people were. I believed they were taking advantage of Jesus. I kept picturing this regular-looking middle eastern man standing in a building, overwhelmed with the amount of hurt, sick, and desperate citizens around him. Does one man really have all that power? Can he save everyone? How can you possibly begin to prioritize that?

            How can someone even begin to pray without thinking about all of this?

            Was it selfish to ask God to help me through high school? Was it selfish of me to ask that God help me through whatever Writer’s Block that made me want to smash my computer and destroy everything in my room?

            Is it selfish that I didn’t entirely trust God to help me through all these things?

            Selfishness can be viewed as a sin. During Lent, in one of my many attempts at journaling, I followed along with a Devotional-a-Day book that my dad had given to the family, which provided a bible passage, some insight, and a question for each day of lent. The first question was something along the lines of, “what do you covet more than God?”

            Well, at the time, what I wanted more than anything was to be able to write again. I’d just graduated from the University of Akron and, in the wake of generating hundreds of pages I had to turn in for various final projects, I found myself unable to write. I’d spend an entire day opening documents—any documents, even unfinished stories that I’d begun in high school—hoping that I could at least get one sentence.

            And I couldn’t.

            And I was so full of rage that, as mentioned earlier, I wanted to smash my computer. Writing was my outlet; now I had nothing. Writing was the only thing I was good at; now I had nothing. It was just me, my computer, and a bunch of unfinished, abandoned documents.

            So, I guess, in a way, I was coveting my ability to write more than I was coveting God.

            But I didn’t feel that way. 

            God and I don’t meet up in church. This is what I told my dad when I was explaining to him why I didn’t want to go to church. Because I don’t get anything from it. Goucher’s chapel is just a space for me. Not a bad space—it’s quite comfortable, really—but it’s just a space. And if God can hear a prayer in the chapel and ignore it, then God should be able to ignore it if I pray from the parking garage underneath my store, right?

            This is, of course, assuming God’s ignoring me. Maybe I’m just not asking the right questions. Or the right way.

            So then what do I ask? How do I ask it?

            How do I pray?

Excerpt taken from On Religion and Identity: Defining Faith on My Terms, my final Goucher thesis. Thought I’d share!