Confessions, Confusions

The Path of Prayer: Reflections on Prayer and True Stories of How It Affects Our Lives
by Sophy Burnham

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When I was a child, I suppose no more than three or four, I knelt beside my bed each night, hands folded sweetly. On one side of me knelt my sister and on the other my mother. She led us through our prayers:

There are four corners on my bed,
There are four angels at my head.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed I sleep on.

And then:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.

In addition, we recited the Lord's Prayer, rattling it off without either thought or understanding, and then we began our litany of "God bless Mummy and Daddy and-"

Now came the fun, as we named everyone and everything we could remember-our aunts and grandparents, the part-time baby-sitter, the ducks (each one by name) and the two horses and the chickens (not by name) and the squirrel or a flight of birds we might have seen that day, and the oak trees and the fallen log we played on in the woods. We went on and on, while our mother prodded us, "Come on."

Finally she would interrupt-"All right, that's enough!"-and toss our giggling little bodies into bed and kiss us on the forehead, turn out the light, and be done with the day!

My sister and I settled into the drowning, stonelike sleep of the pure in heart, knowing we were loved and blessed and never doubting that a magical source of the universe watched over us. How could we doubt? We saw it for ourselves. We lived in the country, and as children we could sense the devas, fairies, elves, and spirits that lived in the shrubs and grasses around us. Each patch of fairy moss was an enchanted tiny landscape, trembling with mystery. The wood-spirits of my childhood were benign, and I think this early sense of goodness, safety, and love pervaded our little brain cells and perhaps has influenced my later vision of life. We talked to trees, to grass, to rocks-a river of prayer, although we never thought of it as that, for prayer as such had rigid definitions.

Mind, I was never taught either in church or at home exactly how to pray-not in any sophisticated sense.

"Have you said your prayers?" my mother would ask, in the same tone and with as much interest as "Have you brushed your teeth?" or, if we were settling into the car for a trip, "Did you go to the john?"

Praying was a duty, like wearing clean underclothes. ("Make sure you have on clean underwear in case you're in an accident," she would say; and, while remembering the advise I wonder, Did she say the same thing to my brother, or was this admonition reserved only for the girls?)

Praying was a manner of speech: "You'd better pray that will come out of the carpet."

It was a subject of curiosity: "Did you know the Hopi Indians believe their prayers and dances make the Earth turn?" The idea evoked a certain superior and tolerant amusement at these less enlightened "primitive" people, who hadn't had the good fortune, as we had, to learn the gravitational laws that keep the stars and planets in place.

My mother, of course, had her own ferocious relationship to prayer. When she was a little girl, her mother (my grandmother) would turn on the mischievous child. "Down on your knees!" she would thunder. "And pray to God to forgive you for that act!" My mother would have to kneel before her righteous mother, hands folded, and pray for God's forgiveness.

No wonder she could not teach me how to pray. I was lucky with such an upbringing that she didn't pass on to me that unforgiving image of God and prayer!

Whatever prayer was, it was not expected to hold a central place in our lives.

We went to church each Sunday at the lovely, soft, redbrick Episcopal (low-church) structure that had served that community since 1742. We bowed our heads before a deity that no one talked about particularly. The congregation raced through the litany like coursers after a hare, and I had the feeling even as a child that when we reached the triumphant end, and everyone tumbled out of the pews in an explosion of noisy greetings, the grown-ups high above our heads laughing and complimenting one another on new hats or good golf scores the day before, or inviting one another home for a prelunch drink, that we had reached the true purpose of Morning Service: social intercourse.

If praying was what had brought us to church, it was forgotten in the general social din. And maybe that's all right; maybe that's one aim of church-to bind us in unity, with unity, comm-unity. But speaking for myself, church didn't teach me much about prayer. And I was left to grapple with this lack for many years, to find my own way, as I suspect is the norm for most of us.

By our teens my siblings and I were, of course, well read in both the Old and New Testaments-on the theory that anyone aspiring to a true understanding of history and literature required strong grounding in the Bible, the cornerstone of Western culture.

But prayer, our spiritual heart?

That was left for our own explorations.

Sometimes I went to a Roman Catholic church with my friend, Kitty. The mass (as the service was called) was different from my tradition-performed in Latin for one thing, quite incomprehensible. It was a good show, with its incense and gaudy priestly robes. When the congregation filed forward for Communion, Kitty hissed, "Sit down! You're not Catholic."

I wondered vaguely about a God that decided who deserved to be enfolded in His grace and who did not. According to Catholic doctrine of that time, only those saved by Christ-reborn, baptized, and confirmed-could go to heaven. All others-including those people unlucky enough to have lived in the thousands of millennia before the birth of Jesus and those who had made the mistake of being born on foreign continents like Asia or Africa-were doomed, poor fools, for having come at the wrong place or time.

It didn't seem quite fair.

In my freshman year of college, my brain awash in the heady skepticism of intellectual pursuit, I lost my faith. Did I believe in God? I could find no more reason for there being a God than reason for there being none. (I meant the God of my childhood, the grandfatherly Renaissance portrait-God in the masculine image of man.) I didn't much care for church worship anymore, which I found dry ritual. Nonetheless, still subject to that twinge of guilt that denotes a not-yet-atrophied conscience and concerned by the suddenness of this loss of faith-this enlarging of perspective-I made one last, halfhearted attempt to go back to my innocent old ways. I went to see the Protestant minister at the college church.

I sat in a wing chair, facing him across his paper-laden desk.

"I've lost my faith," I confessed.

He twirled a pencil miserably between his fingers. "You must have faith," he intoned.

I stared at him in contemptuous surprise. "If I hadn't lost my faith," I wanted to retort sarcastically, "I'd still have it." Instead I waited to see if he had anything more to add. He stared down at his desk, not meeting my eyes-and today, years later, I wonder if he was not going through his own crisis of confidence. He must have felt some sense of inadequacy in the face of this determined young woman.

"Yes. Well. Thank you."

I left, and that, tra-la, was the end of my Christian church attendance for many a year. I left God, or anyway I stopped thinking much about a spiritual dimension, and when I met the atheist who was to become my husband, my admiration for his sharp intellect finished off the job. I claimed a wishy-washy agnostic atheism.

Copyright © 2002 Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Sophy Burnham, an award-winning author, is best known for her classic bestseller, A Book of Angels. A prolific speaker and writer on faith and the spiritual path, her work has been translated into twenty languages and has sold more than one million copies.