Prayer I

This is the first in what I anticipate to be series of prayers. For further explanation, I refer you back to this post on prayer. I don't know what I expect to happen, but anyway:

During the UU service in Philly two Sundays ago, I occasionally glanced over to my right, across to my father, who was sitting a few feet away. I realized that my dad is good at praying. His eyes were closed, he leaned slightly foward. His hands were clasped not in a pious or overly serious pose, but as if he were trying of consolidate his energy, to focus. Anyone who looked at him whould have instantly known that he was in some kind of prayer.

It made me feel good that he can still pray, because it takes some scrap of faith. He's always been one of the most faithful people I've ever met. He's always had faith on both god and people, which I always thought was a beautiful thing. I have no idea where his faith in god is right now -- both my parents have been part of the recent exodus from the Catholic church, not so much for the sex scandals (although those didn't help) but there just got to be too many qualifiers attached. It's hard to be a pro-choice, pro-tolerance, post-feminist Catholic these days. Anyway, I was more worried about that faith in people that was so unique.

I remember a time, more than 10 years ago now, when I was at college in Missouri and fell into the most abject depression I've ever felt. I was suicidal. I was mercifully hospitalized, but I was also 1,000 miles from the family that was really the only reason I was still alive; I could not bear the guilt of having caused them pain. I spent a couple weeks in the hospital, among strangers, without shoelaces or pens or pencils or metal utensils or anything that I might use to kill myself. And my only daily contact with the outside world was a couple of phone calls, including a few with my mom. I can remember her saying to me, "Your dad's really in bad shape. He's losing his faith."

Now, in hindsight, that probably wasn't the ideal thing for her to say to someone in my particular situation, but I was effectively in a big old padded room with no way to hurt myself, so I guess any and all honesty is fair game. But it hurt me more than any hypothetical pain I might have caused by jumping off the eighth-floor balcony. Here was this irrepresible faith that I had always been able to count on, and I was breaking it.

This is what I thought about when I saw my dad praying so hard. He lost his job in a most humiliating and unjust way a couple months ago; it was a job he'd given a lot of his life to, and now -- understandably -- he's adrift. In his mid-50's, it's hard to start over, and none of us know exactly how to help him. The worst possible thing would be to watch him see all that he's worked for disappear, and that seemingly unshakable, almost childlike faith in the goodness of people with it.

So I guess this is my prayer: that his prayers, which I saw him offering to whomever, still have that faith behind them. I believe we'll all get through this time of crisis no matter what, but I want that quality of his to survive as well, because I rely on it more than either of us can truly know.