Sunday Stories: Prayer, Huh (Good God), What Is It Good For?
Sunday Stories: Prayer, Huh (Good God), What Is It Good For?
'The Good Fight', Mary Oliver, Bono, poetry, melodies, and why some of us pray
One of the series I’ll miss most when it ends its eighth and final season later this week is The Good Fight, a legal dramedy that originated on CBS and has been streaming on Paramount+ since 2021.
What began in 2017 as a spinoff to the engrossing The Good Wife (which ran from 2009 to 2016, but I watched for the first time only during the early months of COVID and then slammed all seven seasons before diving into the IMHO far superior sequel), The Good Fight has evolved over its five-year run into one of my favorite shows, particularly in these last two seasons where magical realism (including the healing properties of hallucinogens and/or hallucinations) and apocalyptic storylines that mirror unfathomable and yet true-life events have played an increasingly vital role in the show’s narrative.
The Good Fight episode S6E8, titled “The End of Playing Games,” included a conversation between dueling partners at the fictional Chicago law firm of Reddick Lockhart, Ri’Chard Lane (Andre Braugher) and Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski). Ri’Chard, a new character this season, is a flamboyant, good-hearted bloviator/showman who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve (and seemingly begins and ends every legal meeting with a requisite hand-holding prayer circle.) Diane is an archetypal left-leaning feminist (like myself) and dyed-in-the-wool skeptic who, until quite recently, didn’t seem to have much use for or interest in anything spiritual.
But earlier in the season, suffering from anxiety and PTSD after several violent encounters related to the current volatile political and cultural climate in the United States, Diane seeks help from an unorthodox, if legal, new hallucinogenic drug therapy that involves something the show calls PT108 (it’s not real, I looked it up, but there are similar treatments gaining in popularity that use hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, therapeutically and under medical supervision).
The treatment Diane receives from the dishy Buddhist Dr. Lyle Bettencourt (John Slattery) seems to alleviate Diane’s anxiety and afford her a sunnier (sometimes literally) outlook on life, even amidst the ongoing and escalating protests on the streets of Chicago just outside the law firm’s doors. (Sirens, chanting, flash-bangs, fake grenades tossed into elevators by white supremacists, and explosions are a constant soundtrack running in the background of most The Good Fight scenes this season.) Opening the doors of her perception seems also to have opened Diane’s mind (or heart) to the possible existence of something beyond the physical world.
This new widening of her aperture, if you will, leads Diane to initiate a conversation with Ri’Chard about his faith after she passes his glass-paneled office (he commandeered the conference room as his personal office when he made his grand entrance to Reddick Lockhart earlier in the season) and notices him very obviously bowing his head in prayer.
DIANE: Ri'Chard, what do you get out of it?
RI’CHARD: Um... what, prayer?
DIANE: Yes. God. Religion. What does it do for you?
RI’CHARD: It doesn't do anything for me because it's not transactional. I pray because there is a God, and he desires that I acknowledge him.
DIANE: And you get a sense of peace from it?
RI’CHARD: Yes. I feel calmer. Not always. ( chuckles ) Sit down.
DIANE: Oh, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm just curious.
RI’CHARD: Oh, you're not religious?
DIANE: No. But I met someone who is. Um, a Buddhist. So... yeah, I'm... I'm interested.
RI’CHARD: Well, I don't know what your friend feels, but I like having a straight line in my life. Something constant. Like, uh, the double line on a highway. Keeps me from drifting.
DIANE: I want to believe in God, but... I don't like the way God is used.
RI’CHARD: I know, but... people will always be bad. Even without God, they'll go on hurting each other and killing each other. Do you want to pray with me?
DIANE: No.
RI’CHARD: Why?
DIANE: Well... ( chuckles ) Because... I don't believe, so it would feel hypocritical.
RI’CHARD: You're gonna die.
DIANE: Well, that's true. ( both laugh )
RI’CHARD: And when you die, you'll have to face the thought: What does all this matter? All the things I've done. All the things I believed. Eventually, it just comes down to... you and God.
I don’t know whether The Good Fight employed an advisor for its religious/spiritual content, but if it did, they had an astute one (and listened to him/her/them). There are so many ways that conversation could have fallen into tropes and stereotypes, but it didn’t. In fact, I saw a bit of myself in both Ri’Chard and Diane.
It was his “it’s not transactional” as well as her “it would feel hypocritical.”
Both got me thinking about why we pray, and, more precisely, Why do I pray?
How does prayer “work,” for lack of a better descriptor?
Does that matter?
And does prayer—praying or being prayed for—make any difference?
I watched that episode of The Good Fight a few days after I recorded a lengthy interview for a forthcoming audio documentary about the poetry of Mary Oliver and, at least in part, its spiritual import. (I was the interviewee, not the interviewer.)
About half-way through our conversation about Ms. Oliver and her extraordinary oeuvre, the interviewer introduced the topic of prayer, asking how I prayed, how I understand prayer, how that perhaps has changed over the years, and how the poet might have influenced or echoed my understanding (if you could call it that) of prayer.
While I don’t want to give too many spoilers away as the Oliver audio project won’t be released until next spring, I do want to share some of what I discovered about what I actually believe (and don’t) by having said it out loud.
My earliest conception of prayer was not of words, precisely, but of sounds—in the form of English with a smattering of Latin. At the time of this reception, as an infant in arms somewhere in the back of a Catholic church, I was fluent in neither, but the sound of the prayers that were recited and offered in the liturgy of the Roman mass is where organized prayer, for me, began.
I say “organized” because I have come to believe that there are infinite ways to pray, chief among them, perhaps, breathing. We all breathe and it is a prayer, even if we don’t think of it as such. And it doesn’t matter whether we think of it as prayer or not.
As I got a bit older in childhood and “made” my First Communion at the age of 7-and-a-half, prayers had come to mean words arranged in a set order that we memorized and recited together. The Our Father. The Hail Mary. Decades of the rosary. St. Francis of Assisi had a good one that began, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace….” The Prayers of the People, which were slightly more freestyle than the rest of the liturgical prayers.
By the time I reached my tween years, after First Communion but before I had the chance to celebrate the sacrament of Confirmation, my family of origin had left Catholicism for the Wild West of 1980s American evangelicalism, where the idea of reciting ancient prayers was anathema. If you had the “personal relationship” with Jesus-Christ-As-Your Lord-and-Savior that you were supposed to have, then you talked to him like you would (almost) anybody else. It was a conversation. You were meant to open your heart to God when you prayed, whether silently or aloud, alone or in a group. It was to be extemporaneous and “from the heart.”
There was an appeal to this, that God might be interested in the details of my life, what I was concerned about, my friends and family, my needs and desires, fears and shortcomings. I spent a lot of time throughout my life praying this way, in words, in conversation with God, through Jesus Christ, the great mediator, and the Holy Spirit, our Intercessor. But there always has been a performative aspect to this notion of prayer that I find disquieting. How many mini-sermons have I heard directed passive-aggressively to someone in the room who remained unnamed (or sometimes not) in the communal prayer being offered by someone else? Too often, those prayers seemed to me to say much more about the pray-er than the one being prayed for, nevermind the One to whom the petitions were being directed.
There was a shorthand of, “Lord, just, [insert verb] …” that sounded to my ears and heart like a nervous tick. Still does.
And then there was the kind of prayer that my mother embraced as a so-called “prayer warrior.” This designation means different things in different spiritual and/or denominational settings, but in the case of my mother, who was a spiritual bully (however well intentioned), it was in the pentecostal/charismatic and later “Prosperity Gospel” name-it-and-claim-it brand of prayer and spirituality that spent a lot of time and energy (much of it extraordinarily nervous, wildly triumphalistic or a troubling melange of both) trying to manipulate the spirit realm, to keep Satan and his evil forces at bay and to strong-arm God into doing whatever it was that was on the top of their list of anxieties and desires.
Looking back on the era of my life when I was at least tangentially connected to those kinds of ideas and practices around prayer through my mother, it seems as if some people had rejected the prayers of an ancient liturgy and replaced them with a never-ending verbal search for a new set of magic words to use in lobbying the Almighty, to perhaps change God’s mind. A different kind of bullying.
It also felt as if a parallel effort ran alongside what I’ve just described, and that was to make sure one was praying the “right way” so that the prayer(s) would “work” correctly. As if they were incantations or recipes.
There’s a lot I don’t know, much more, in fact, now than when I was younger. And that is such a spectacular blessing, not knowing—a profound freedom I can scarcely describe.
These days I don’t believe prayer has much to do with any of that. What I told the interviewer for the Mary Oliver series when she asked me about the evolution of how I understand prayer is that I have no idea how prayer “works” or doesn’t, and that I’m absolutely fine with not knowing.
There’s a lot I don’t know, much more, in fact, now than when I was younger. And that is such a spectacular blessing, not knowing—a profound freedom I can scarcely describe.
It’s not a matter of doubting anything. It’s a realization that God and the universe are so much grander, so much more vast, expansive, audacious, ineffable, glorious, grace-filled, loving, plentiful, and mysterious than anything I might fool myself into believing I can get my head or arms or heart around, to tame, label, explain, market, brand, or franchise them.
The way I understand prayer now, my whole life is a prayer—every breath I take, every move I make, to use a quote from Sting in a way I’m guessing he mightn’t appreciate (but maybe he would—who knows?) It’s still a conversation with God, with Jesus and, with the Universe, but I talk less and listen more than I did in the past.
I am reminded of a poet friend who likens praying to tossing pebbles at God’s windows, and of Søren Kierkegaard who said (in one English translation of his Danish), “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays”; and of C.S. Lewis who, when asked why he prayed, answered: “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”
When I was lying in that hospital bed in the California desert a month or so ago, in pain and terrified as I watched my right leg turn red and bloat as rattlesnake venom and the antivenom fought it out in my bloodstream, the only thing I wanted was prayer. Mine. Yours. Those of friends and family and strangers. In whatever way they might pray, whether they called it that or not.
And when the prayers arrived (if that’s even an appropriate verb for such a transcendent experience) I felt them. They “worked,” whatever that means. I felt lifted up, supported, loved, and also grounded, connected—to a great cloud of witnesses alive and dead and to what I call God.
In his new memoir Surrender, Bono, a genuinely prayerful person I know well enough to have prayed for him and have been prayed for by him, describes his experience of prayer this way: “Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.”
Songs have been and often are my prayers, too. Sometimes even Bono’s songs. I try to speak up/But only in you I'm complete/Gloria…
In Surrender, Bono goes on to describe a melody that resides in his heart and mind. Not a primal prayer, necessarily, but perhaps his primal sound.
“I have heard a melody that even now can soothe my soul if I’m disquieted,” Bono writes. “I don’t know how I came across it, perhaps I first heard it when I was nine or ten, a piece for a boy soprano. I know I learned it long before my voice broke. It’s a melody put to the words of the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.’ On restless nights when sleep eludes me, I sing it in my head. In those moments when I feel lost, this melody finds me. It takes me beyond concept or idea, beyond the theory of a higher power. The melody brings me to a name, and for a split second I am named by this name. I discover who I am. I sense my original identity, my real self behind whatever masks I am wearing to cover up fear of abandonment or loneliness.”
My primal sound is that of the Gregorian-era chant “ora pro nobis,” Latin for “pray for us” as intoned by more than 100 members of the college of cardinals as they processed into the Sistine Chapel to begin their deliberations (with the Holy Spirit’s help, it is said traditionally) to choose the papal successor, in this case Pope Francis. That’s where I consciously remember the melody/sound in my mind originating, from a late morning in Rome on March 12, 2013 as the cardinals pray/sang the Litaniae Sanctorum—the “litany of the saints” that calls those who have gone before us into the More by name and asks them to intercede for us in prayer.
But I have a hunch that I’d heard that chant much earlier than 2013—perhaps in the halls of the convent where my great-aunt Sister Mary Charles lived when I was a little girl. Maybe at a mass in my infancy. Wherever it came from, it resides in the echo-chamber of my soul. And it plays on a loop when I need it, the sound, if not the words, although sometimes both.
Most often, my primal sound switches on in the middle of the night when I find myself suddenly awake.
In the silence. In the stillness.
To be still. That, too, is a prayer.
I think Ms. Oliver understood the stillness part of whatever prayer is and whatever happens to them wherever and however they are offered.
“I Happened to Be Standing” by Mary Oliver
Listen to Mary Oliver read her poem (below) from NPR’s On Being program
I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do. Do cats pray, while they sleep half-asleep in the sun? Does the opossum pray as it crosses the street? The sunflowers? The old black oak growing older every year? I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive. Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not. While I was thinking this I happened to be standing just outside my door, with my notebook open, which is the way I begin every morning. Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not. I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.
—From A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 2012)
“She knew God,” I told the interviewer about Ms. Oliver. “That's very clear to me. I don't think she gave a hoot about [spiritual] labels, nor should she have. But Mary was certainly someone who knew the divine and recognized the divine when she saw it, which was all around her all the time.”
Ms. Oliver most assuredly was an avid reader of the Book of Nature. I love that image of her standing in the threshold, pen aloft, awaiting the numinous download.
As I prepared for the Oliver documentary interview, I dug out a copy of her book of prose, Upstream, which I recall reading in the middle of the night in a solo train berth on a long rail journey in the fall of 2016. What I hadn’t remembered was what I wrote on the end paper at the back of the book:
“She is our Heaney, our Clare to his Francis.”
I meant Seamus Heaney, of course, who famously “dug” with his pen, and who, although he claimed to be “woefully inarticulate” about matters of his faith, did know a thing or two about the sounds between and beneath things, about stillness and waiting, about the numinosity of the natural world, and perhaps also about the “why” of prayer.
Hear it calling out to every creature. And they drink these waters, although it is dark here Because it is the night. I am repining for this living fountain. Within this bread of life I see it plain Although it is the night.
— “Station Island XI” by By Seamus Heaney from his collection Station Island
Or as the great man described it in the poem he titled “A Found Poem” when he gifted it to me for The God Factor years back:
Like everybody else, I bowed my head
during the consecration of the bread and wine,
lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice,
believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred.
I went to the altar rails and received the mystery
on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made
an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt
time starting up again.
There was never a scene
when I had it out with myself or with an other.
The loss of faith occurred off stage. Yet I cannot
disrespect words like ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’
or even ‘communion wafer.’ They have an undying
pallor and draw, like well water far down.
— “A Found Prayer” by Seamus Heaney from The God Factor
And with that, I will leave you for this Sunday evening. But not before offering a prayer my beloved friend Christina, an Episcopal priest in South Dakota, said over a gathering of friends recently on Zoom.
Lord, It Is Night
from A New Zealand Prayer Book He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa
Lord, it is night. The night is for stillness. Let us be still in the presence of God. It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be. The night is dark. Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives rest in you. The night is quiet. Let the quietness of your peace enfold us, all dear to us, and all who have no peace. The night heralds the dawn. Let us look expectantly to a new day, new joys, new possibilities. In your name we pray. Amen.
In this new week, may you be brave and kind, remembering that you have not met yet everyone who will love you and that you have not met yet everyone you will love.
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This is a gorgeous piece of writing. Also, I'm glad to hear there is a TV show (or at least a scene in a TV show) that depicts a religious person with curiosity and respect. I pray the Lord's Prayer every night with my son. What I often remind him of--and this is the power of the prayer for me--is that untold numbers over millennia have uttered this prayer, and when we pray it we step into that timeless stream of longing and hope.
Love this Cath. Thank you. ❤️