On Prayer

I pray. I prayed as a child. As a good, young Catholic school boy. Not as “fervently” and “piously” as my classmates evidently believed I did given my extreme quietness (maybe not “shyness,” but quietness, out of fear of… Or, maybe, just out of “fear”) and the fact that I shared a first name with the saint my elementary school was named after.

They evidently believed I spent my free time reading the Bible, as one fellow student once told me, rather than playing computer games concerning baseball, football, or the Civil War, or being “picked on” by my brother and his friends while playing “Risk,” the “game of global domination” (When we played, it was more like the game of “kid-brother domination”… When they weren’t threatening to puree my favorite hat in a blender or pouring water down on me from my parents’ bedroom window as I threw mud up at them from below…).

But the Bible?!?!?! That shit was boring, man. And incomprehensible… “Thine,” “thou,” and “thou art”… and what not.

But I prayed the standard Catholic prayers… And for the standard “Catholic school boy” reasons… Snow days, for the Phillies to win the World Series… and to go to heaven. Can’t forget that one.

But I DID also pray for other reasons… for the “souls” of long-lost and departed loved ones or of those in “purgatory” whom I had never met, or that no one would get or had gotten hurt or died if I heard a police car, fire truck, or ambulance siren, or for that middle-aged priest at church who stuttered, or for… Well, for a lot of other reasons.

I prayed. Just in case. Because what harm could it do?

At the time of the breakdown, I prayed kinda’, sorta’. I “prayed” in the midst of it. I turned to the Bible, yes, at that time. As a “shield.” I even used it as a literal shield, to “ward off” “evil” spirits that I felt were attacking me.

To no avail.

But ALL of those prayers were in vain.

In “vain.”

But I continue to pray. Or, maybe, rather, I truly pray now. In a way I haven’t since I was a small child. In sincerity and hopefulness. Not so that I can have a snowball fight with my brother and his friends tomorrow, or that one of those ice-encrusted snowballs from the hand of my brother’s Drago-like best friend won’t crush my skull, or that Mitch Williams doesn’t blow game six… I pray, in whichever manner I choose to, because I choose to. Because I WANT to.

And that’s the action that matters.

Because it’s my choice.

“Choice,” another interesting word…

‘Til then…