Betsy is back to work, scanning my items at the grocery store. She was out for months with a mastectomy, radiation, and chemo. Her first days back, she wore a kind of turban, but didn’t pencil in her eyebrows; she just let them be gone. Everyone knew anyway.
When we first met her, several years ago, she already knew the treatment that lay ahead, and even then, she seemed one of the most joyful people I’d ever met. My wife and I talked her into coming over for dinner. She wanted to talk about it, so I asked questions, some of them probing her fears, about dying and staying sick for months. She’d faced them all already; what she wanted to talk about was getting free from what she called, “false values.” When she left, we felt as though a saint had visited us, but since we’d laughed so much, we decided Betsy was an angel, blessed with the radiance only real praying can give to suffering.
Betsy has accepted cancer the way it is. She is like a clean window. Nothing is in the way, no anger, no resentment, and no comparison to others.
Much of my life, though, I’m not so clean. My upsets, fears, and concerns constantly muddy my view. Then I need to pray. Praying is like keeping an eye on the wild puppies of my mind so they don’t chew up the furniture. This self-awareness is particularly necessary when something has begun to obscure, distort, or usurp Reality. When the breeze on my face and a thought about my own approaching death all flow seamlessly together, I feel satisfied, secure, connected to the “Good Stuff.”
Perhaps we might say that prayer really is about re‑union. Connection is what sets me free. I want to be hooked up to the Reality going on around me, hooked up to the Reality going on within me, and unhooked from the deceptions.
I think it works like this: the kind of praying that fits me like my favorite old sneakers is any mental event that rescues me from the false illusions that make me nervous. (The Hebrew and Christian scriptures call them "idols".) Real Reality (“God,” is only one of the labels humans use) settles me down, makes me feel more safe (“saves” me), and makes me more at home inside my life. Unhooking from the deceptions (what everybody calls — mistakenly, with a groan — “the real world”) is all prayer really is. Betsy knows how to do it.
Peace is only peace
when nothing can get at it.
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