On Prayer

I have loosened, deflated, and relaxed my prayers under the influence of fresh and fairly convincing intelligence of God’s recent departure to parts unknown, and now to even notify whoever is left at the abandoned Heaven colony of my presence and sound health, I am forced to make unnaturally loud noises on my knees beside my humble cot before sighing hard and laying myself down upon it, all aches and jitters, never sleeping any more than twenty minutes at a time and listening for long stretches to my prayers echo back through the ducts. My grandmother’s girlfriend in Windsor said not ever to pray for patience because “God’s gonna wallop your ass on account of he knows more than you by a bushelful respective of how much shit you can make a person try ’n' learn to be patient about.” My grandmother’s girlfriend is a lady named Madge and the arrangement is odd, for sure, but the way my grandmother describes it, she was an old lady when grandfather died and she simply could not be choosey. In Alcoholics Anonymous they claim they pray “for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out,” and that both makes good sound sense and means that you should not pray for treats or reprieve or fancy that your every impulse or compulsion is God giving his co-signer’s blasé thumbs up. A reprieve? The reformist drunks in the church basements and community centres, many holding on by the skin of their teeth, believe that all they have is a daily reprieve contingent upon the maintenance of one’s spiritual condition. What is a spiritual condition? It is the state of being sentient and surrounded by all kinds of stuff and noise that doesn’t make any more sense to you than you do. Madge has one of those old hulking ashtrays that you can roll around and lives in a storybook neighbourhood that made me chuckle it was so quaint and sleepy. She’s a recovering alcoholic and private prayer connoisseur, into all the styles, methods, and arcana. She looked at me hard and told me that looking at things really hard is actually a specific style of meditation. “You are anemic,” she added. “Hush, boy. God has been informed now and there’s nothing to do but sit here and talk turkey, waitin’ on that miracle.” I asked her if there was anything to eat and she casually threw upon the table three Tootsie Rolls that she had been concealing I do not know where.