33 Prayer

When my mother was fifteen years old, she contracted spinal meningitis. Her temperature rose nine degrees higher than normal and she nearly died. Her doctors seemed helpless. Every day and night, my mother told me, her parents knelt beside her bed and prayed to God for her life and indeed she did recover and live; but as a result of her terrible illness my mother lost her hearing and for the rest of her life she was totally deaf.

"Her fever blew that fuse in her brain," my father would explain.

"Oh."

Both my mother and her father attributed her survival at least in part to God and to the power of prayer and I know this experience is an important factor in my mother's own religious faith.

Much more important to my own understanding of life in this universe is another story my mother told me of her own and her family's acceptance of and adjustment to the loss of her hearing in the aftermath of their ordeal. When except for her being deaf my mother had fully recovered and was well, her father gathered the family together for a meeting.

They were not going to be bitter, her father told them, they were not going to blame God, they were not going to blame the doctors, they were not going to blame themselves, they were not going to be resentful, they were not going to be discouraged, they were not even going to be sad.

"It's over and done with," her father told the family. "We're going to put it behind us and go forward."

"It was so smart of him to say that," my mother told me. "I was so grateful."

I understood.

"His attitude helped me so much."

Yes.

It has helped me, too, many times.

Forward.

The hardest I ever prayed was when Leigh got pregnant our senior year of high school. From the day Leigh told me she'd missed her second period and was sure now that she was pregnant until the day three weeks later when I somehow found the courage to tell my father, the first thing I did every morning the moment I woke up was to hang my head over the edge of my bed and gag with the dry heaves. For three weeks every night in bed before I turned and tossed and struggled for hours to fall asleep I prayed like a fucking fiend.

"Jesus! Please! God! No!"

Once I was away from my parents and out on my own I never went back to Church. By my sophomore year of college I no longer called myself Christian. To make a long story short I'll say just that I didn't believe Jesus was a god. Neither did I nor would I ever believe in—let alone worship—a god who judged, punished, and even tortured people simply because of what they did or did not believe.

Yet I was more than familiar with the central stories of what Christians pejoratively call the Old Testament and of course with the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and with his teachings, and my childhood education in these matters paid considerable intellectual dividends in my analyses and interpretations of literature at Iowa State, Indiana, and Arizona State universities.

For me then as for most Americans even now the word "religion" meant Judaism maybe and Christianity mainly if not only. Though I did respect the role that religion played in the protests and nonviolence of Gandhi and King, I did not really understand it; and by 1974 I believed that religion of any kind—Christianity in particular—was long behind me. Except as an interesting superstition, a curiosity of intellectual history, and a necessary instrument of literary exegesis I considered religion both meaningless and stupid.

Little did I know.