Before now I had never prayed in the churches I had visited. But I remember the morning that followed this experience. I remember how I climbed the deserted Aventine, in the spring sun, with my soul broken up with contrition, but broken and clean, painful but sanitary like a lanced abscess, like a bone broken and re-set. And it was true contrition, too, for I don’t think I was capable of mere attrition, since I did not believe in hell. I went to the Dominicans’ Church, Santa Sabina. And it was a very definite experience, something that amounted to a capitulation, a surrender, a conversion, not without struggle, even now, to walk deliberately into the church with no other purpose than to kneel down and pray to God. Ordinarily, I never knelt in these churches, and never paid any formal or official attention to Whose house it was. But now I took holy water at the door and went straight up to the altar rail and knelt down and said, slowly, with all the belief I had in me, the Our Father.
It seems almost unbelievable to me that I did no more than this, for the memory remains in me as that of such an experience that it would seem to have implied at least a half hour of impassioned prayer and tears. The thing to remember is that I had not prayed at all for some years.
Over the last couple days, I've returned to prayer myself after a long absence. Let's just say that God and I had a falling out and leave it at that. I felt like He had taken a few steps back from me. He was still there. The Catholic schoolboy in me knew this. However, the struggling adult felt slightly abandoned. I'd try to pray, and I couldn't.
Yesterday, I realized that prayer is sort of like writing for me. When I don't write for a while, I start feeling very disconnected from myself and my world. When I sit down with my journal and pen (or at my laptop), I am able to process the big and little things going on in my life. Order them. Make sense of them. It's the way my mind works.
Same with prayer. Prayer allows me to approach my life's impossibles. Big questions and issues over which I have little control, but which control me. Job things. Marriage things. Health things. Happiness things. Sadness things. When I pray, I'm able to let go of my overwhelming need for control. I touch these things, think about them, pray over them, and send them out into the universe. Like dropping a message into a bottle and tossing it into the Pacific Ocean. I don't know where that bottle's going to end up, but I have faith that it will get where it's supposed to go.
So, I have returned to sending out my messages. Dropped one last night into a bottle. It had to do with my marriage and family. Tossed it into a dark, green sea. Let it go. And today, I prayed for my son on his first day back at school. He's struggled with education for a while because of ADHD and some bullying. Sent that bottle out into the Pacific, watched it sail away from me and disappear, the way my son got on his school bus this morning and was gone.
I picked my son up this afternoon from his bus stop. He came off the bus lugging his backpack and looking happy. Not what I expected. When he got in the car, he said he had a good day. Liked his teachers. No homework to do. In fact, he had a great day.
That message in a bottle got where it needed to go. Prayer answered.
I'm not fully on speaking terms with God yet. We still have some disagreements to hash out. However, this evening, I feel closer to God than I have in a long while.
And for that miracle, Saint Marty gives thanks.
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