Occasional Prayer

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

Kahlil Gibran

She asks for quiet. I merge the car onto the tollway, balancing a cup of McDonald’s coffee between my legs. Our little ritual. We’ll place the cups in their cardboard tray and, during the first mile or so, each say a quiet prayer, for safety, for ours and others’. Mine will be a simple request. A statement, really. (Please watch over us and see that we arrive safely from our destination to our destination; please watch over all drivers and pedestrians and see that each and every one arrive safely from their destination to their destination.) In my best cultural Catholicism, this will be followed by a mumbled Lord’s Prayer. I’ll labor to concentrate while I pray, elbowing out pesky grammarian voices. Amy always takes a little longer, gazing at passing fields. Her Jewish entreaties are longer and more involved. Complex, anyway. (“I dunno. I have more people to say hi to?” she’ll shrug later.) Before long I’m eyeing my coffee, idly thinking that I’ll check Wikipedia when we get back home and read up on those Coffee Burning Lawsuits. Real? Urban Myth? I’m impatient to drink.

The routine and self-centeredness that quickly wove itself into praying when I was young is a fact of my spiritual life that I’ve often wondered about, sensing that it must mean something, suggest a larger understanding of the worthiness of a life lived in conscious struggle. When I fell away from the Church in my late teens, I fell as a cliché. Burdened at an early age with hyper self-consciousness, I’d be overly aware while at mass at Saint Andrew the Apostle, gripped in the classic adolescent manner by doubts and anxieties: Am I getting it? What “it” was I didn’t know—only that the stern frowns of the nuns that I imagined turned toward me while I struggled to focus on prayer felt like a facial equivalent of a check-minus.

When I was ten or eleven years old, I was convinced that my family was trying to kill me. Each night I’d lean over the bathroom sink down the hall from the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, trembling as I brushed my teeth, knowing for certain—the certainty being the splash of cold fear in my chest—that my older brothers, conniving with my parents, had poisoned the Crest with venom hidden in the basement. I’d lie in bed later, next to my younger brother, and stare at the dark ceiling in slow, crawling dread that I’d within minutes begin the agonizing writhing into death. My siblings’ jackal, wild-eyed faces hovered over me in the dark; I’d hear conspiratorial muttering in the hallway, quiet smiling. Eventually, my fears blossomed to include poisoned breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, all manner of household cuisine terreur.

A couple of years later, I was locked in chest-tightening blues in seventh grade, convinced that my friends hated me and wanted me to disappear. In my imagination, I was plagued by boys who yapped at each other in a foreign language, and by girls with blossoming breasts who looked right through me. I’d wander to the other side of Saint Andrews and stand mutely and pathetically by a pole and its flopping flag. I confessed this all to my mom on a long night when she found me sobbing hysterically in the shower, Fabergé Organic shampoo running down my face. Moments later, she slapped me. It’s testament to the relationship I have with my mom that I understood the desperation behind the gesture: her son was turning into a self-obsessed monster; Get out of yourself already! I had a small bruise to lie about the next day, though I don’t think that anyone noticed. Within a couple of weeks, the depression lifted. I was social again.

I never confessed to my family my irrational fears that...