Prayer is a Ladder

I identify myself as Roman Catholic, and I take my faith very seriously. But the truth is that I am a person of weak faith who has always struggled with believing. In late high school and early college, I fell away from the Church and identified myself as agnostic bordering on atheistic (I think I was too lazy at the time to truly be an atheist.) I had several conversion experiences studying abroad in Ireland, which led me in large part to pursuing my masters in theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, DC. Since then, I have not lost my faith. Nor did I lose it when I lost Lizzy.

You may find this remarkable, but I believe it is the opposite. I did not lose my faith not because my faith is so strong, but because it is weak. I keep to the discipline of my faith because I need it to function and because the logic of it appeals to me. If you do not work out, your muscles and organs weaken and become more susceptible to disease. Similarly, if you do not shower or wash your hands, the lack of basic hygiene can open you up to disease. For me, it follows that if you do not practice spiritual exercise, your spirit/soul will weaken and become vulnerable to disease (manifesting often in mental and emotional illness). I am a very practical person, sometimes to a fault–where I become utilitarian with the things I do. As a result, prayer as an exercise has always been very difficult for me, since it is hard to see or feel an immediate result.

I think that if I had a more emotional and passionate relationship with God, I may have lost my faith out of a sense of rage and betrayal. But faith has always been an intellectual thing for me, first and foremost, and I do not believe this is necessarily to my credit. I use philosophy and theology to make sense of my life, to give me a reason to be here, to try, and to pursue life. If I had the emotional life of faith, my experience with losing Lizzy would have been different.

I wish I was a different person. I wish I had a different mind. I wish I could be the kind of person I admire, whose belief is pure, genuine, emotional, and childlike. I wish I could practice things like surrender without it making me want to throw up. But this is not me, nor has it ever been. I do not admire the person that I am.

But I pray every day. I pray in pursuit of the personhood that I desire. I pray in pursuit of the faith I hope to feel one day. I pray that my mind will not continue to get in the way of each and every spiritual practice in which I participate. I am Catholic because the reason and logic of Catholicism provides the most harmony with the worldview I have developed so far. Very simply, it makes the most sense to me. And I find it to be very beautiful. Beautiful that humanity matters so much that God became human. Beautiful that God loved us so much that He became human to participate in suffering and death. Beautiful that suffering and death is so fundamentally wrong to our human experience that God unmade death with His death. Christianity is a beautiful faith. I think, at the very least, most people can agree on that.

When Lizzy died, every single minute that I continued to draw breath became work. The act of living, of doing the basic things every day that perpetuate life– eating, drinking, breathing, eliminating, sleeping–all seemed too laborious to endure. Beyond that, they seemed pointless. Drowning, I held to the only thing that made sense about my life: Cecilia. She kept me alive, and she keeps me alive still.

But the work remains. Each step no longer feels so infinitely heavy, and I no longer have to choke down each mouthful. But the practice of being here, of reminding myself that there is purpose behind my acts, of pretending to myself and to the world that I matter at all–has remained. Each day I wake up to remind myself that Lizzy is gone. To cycle through the memories of the horror of how I lost her, the infinite void that she left, and the fundamental suffering that now lies ahead of me because of her absence. From there, it becomes the practice to force myself into a routine of busy nothings during which I participate in all of the life-giving acts that sustain my life and therefore Cecilia’s life. It is about getting through the minutes, making time pass, getting to the next thing and then the next so that the day can be over.

But there is no relief. Because falling asleep is worse than waking up. And falling asleep and waking up are the two worst parts of my day. And so I use my coping mechanism, which is to break up the monotonous continuum with prayer.

Cecilia and I pray upon waking: the Morning Offering and St. Patrick’s Breastplate, for whom Lizzy was named. We read from my favorite gospel: John.

We pray the Angelus three times a day: at 6 am, 12 noon, and 6 pm.

At 3 pm, we say the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, the Anima Christi, and the Rosary.

We pray before meals. And before bed, we say “Now I Lay Me,” the Guardian Angel prayer, the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, the prayer of St. Benedict, a litany to the saints to whom I feel a special connection, and finally, a prayer to put Cecilia to sleep: “May God bless you and keep you. May the angels watch you as you sleep, enfold you in their wings, and may God hold you in the palm of His Hand, now and forevermore.” This is the same prayer I used to put Lizzy to sleep.

And at the end of each session, we say a prayer to Lizzy too: “St. Elizabeth of the Springtime, pray for us. Be with us always, and, in God’s time, guide us home to heaven with you. We love you, Lizzy.”

This may seem like a lot. But the reality is that it only takes 60-70 minutes of my day. 1 out of 24 hours throughout which the minutes drag by anyway. And it only takes that long because I say the rosary while we go on our walks and thus can really take my time with it. Normally, a rosary only takes about fifteen minutes, but mine take twice that long because I meditate on each mystery before beginning it. I think about how it relates to my life, and then I petition God that I may grow in the graces manifested by that mystery. Sometimes this results in minutes of me just walking, crying, and pleading aloud with God while Cecilia naps. So it takes longer, but it helps to process what’s happening inside of my brain and to consciously direct it towards life-giving ideas rather than the death-condemning ones that seem to be where I spend most of my mental energy.

And, you know, I think that’s what prayer is really about. Just as I feel confession is really about us and our need to ritualize something in order to get past it. Prayer gives us a way to organize and direct the mental chaos that dominates our conscious minds. It allows us to filter through and reject the thoughts that do not help us become better, but rather keep us mediocre. They say the Rosary is the Western, Christian form of meditation, and I suppose I do meditate while I say it. Because after I petition at the beginning of each mystery, the repetition of the “Hail Marys” brings my mind to thoughts and feelings that weren’t there before. And through this, I come to view one nuance of how Lizzy died or of her being gone in a way I didn’t see it before. Or I come up with a subject that I want to write about, to further explore or examine.

And this, I suppose, is why I say that prayer is a ladder. On a basic level, it structures my day and allows me to get through this minute, this prayer, and then wait until it is time for the next. On a deeper level, it gives me dedicated time to focus on the trauma, the despair, the mental self-mutilation that is so much a part of my waking hours, and filter through the debris and chaos. It is a slow cleaning. A processing.

Perhaps I am shameful or contemptible for using prayer in so utilitarian or selfish a way. All I know is that I am not capable of much right now, and praying helps me get through the day. So I use it. I climb the ladder of prayer, day by day, and even if I slide right back down to the bottom of the ladder that night, needing to climb the ladder again gives me something to do the next day.

With time, I hope and I pray that I will stop falling down the ladder and that I can just keep climbing until I arrive at some destination, whether it be peace, a renewed sense of purpose, death, or heaven–but I have to believe it’s leading me somewhere. And so I keep climbing, maybe because I don’t know what else to do. But I do know that I would rather live my life climbing towards a beautiful lie than I would spend it wallowing in the filth that I am trying to escape. And if that makes me weak, then let me be weak.