A time for prayer

My niece Leah lies in a hospital bed in Michigan, where she has been for nearly three weeks now. She is unable even to squeeze her mother’s hand. She is 32. In September of this year, she was diagnosed with stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and the treatment so compromised her immune system that she now has a fierce infection that doctors are trying to beat back. She remains under heavy sedation, while her mother and other family members visit daily. Diane, her mother, tries to keep her spirits up but it is moment-to-moment struggle. I have not seen Leah for years – her uncle Roger and I divorced years ago – but I have remained close to the family and I feel the pain in their voices when we speak on the phone. There is no more helpless feeling than seeing someone you love gravely ill – as so many of us know. So, a request: please keep her and them in your version of prayer. They could use it now.

Varieties of prayer

The boy was maybe 4 or 5, and he was kneeling on the doorstep of a house that belonged to a dead man when Rick happened to drive by. His hands were folded in prayer, while his parent sat in a waiting car nearby. He was praying for Robert Young, “the man by the side of the road” who had been killed in a freak accident earlier this fall. Robert Young had endeared himself to many with his daily, friendly waves to all the motorists who drove past his house on busy Route 102. The child, apparently, had been one of them. Now, he was doing the one thing that seems to help in the face of inexplicable loss: offering up the pain and confusion to something higher. Then there was our friend Larry “Big Thunder” Schertzer, who joined a group of us celebrating Thanksgiving in Vermont. Larry is a man without an address – not homeless, exactly, but someone who moves from friend to friend, relative to relative, to work and make his sculptures and play his trumpet and move on. On that dazzlingly sunny, sweet-aired day that was this year’s Thanksgiving, he slipped away from the celebrants for a few moments and went outside, where he strolled a bit then lifted his arms to the sky in some kind of prayerful acknowledgement. Then there’s my version. Earlier today, I sat myself on my meditation zafu (a position I do not assume nearly often enough) and let my thoughts go, while my senile old dog whimpered softly downstairs and a cool breeze wafted through the window and I could send loving thoughts to everyone from my dearest friends to the public official I wrote about who would love to run me out of town. Seems to me it doesn’t much matter what form our prayers take, as long as we offer them.