More on: prayer

Mussoorie, India Lying on the bed below you, I never managed to ask you to pray for us, or to see you weep the blood you’re famous for. I just loved to stare— and you didn’t seem to mind— at your barely blushing cheekbones, lit by the angel’s glow. You warmed me with your incandescent…

I SOMETIMES CARRY a rosary these days, a Spanish one of wooden beads that a friend gave to me. I used to think that it reflected the same impulse as needlework, which I do inexpertly—a desire for the consolation of repetition. Now I consider it a spiritual discipline, as I try, in middle age, to…

pace Thomas Merton When you pray, let your tongue taste the words it forms, and let your mind watch the meanings forming. This will paralyze your prayers, but it will stop your meaningless recitations. Next, as you pray to God, think about his omniscience, his power, his goodness and the problem of theodicy. This too…

I couldn’t wrap my mouth around the vowel of your name. Your name, a cave of blue wind that burrows and delves endlessly, that rings off the walls of my drumming, lilting heart, through the tiny pulsations of my wrists, the blood in my neck. I couldn’t hold the energy of your name in my…

I will my soul to waken, and my soul does not wake. My mind busies itself, remembering forgotten songs from my adolescence. My mind recalls anything, so as not to listen. I will my hands to be calm, Lord, and they fly to my teeth to crease my nails. Lord, I will myself to be…

Speak to me about the presence of absence. Not everything created can be seen. As the uncreated may be glimpsed from a slant. What we bring is attention— prayer in our hands, spirit in our lungs. Emptiness—but a focus on what borders and frames the space— what the space is filled by. Nothing empty of…

You lie like a comma in the sentence of your bed. Your legs stack like planks; each hand steadies the opposite shoulder. It’s a position you assume when assailed by dreams or sleepless longing, or on nights you feel you’re breathing broken glass. Tonight you buckle into yourself and mourn two vocabularies, a moldy discourse…

All he ever wanted was to disappear. But he kept coming upon himself as if he were a character in a story who, despite his best efforts to understand, remained inscrutable. How he tried to keep straight the difference between who the author said he was and who he thought he was. He told himself…

IT HAD BEEN a church once, no, had been a home for the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which is the name she finds stamped on the inside of the missal. In the vestry, off the small chapel in back, she finds a pair of candlesticks inside of a drawer, along with the…

MY SON AT TWELVE believes in the Greek gods. Zeus, Athena. Jin favors Poseidon and Ares but likes them all. He can tell intricate stories, like the one about Baucis and Philemon, an old couple who took in Mercury and Jupiter disguised as travelers. A thousand villagers had turned the gods away, and a thousand were…