What’s the thing with prayer?

What’s the thing with prayer? Where do words go? Once they are uttered, do they slide out of the window, drop to the pavement to be washed into the gutter, down through the grates, into the river? How do you pump words up so they’ll hold air and perhaps catch an updraft?

What implement to use? What invocation? What incantation? Which heuristic program? What sect keeps the recipe?

And still we pray.

We pray, we trade our lives in the dark for the life of one loved. We make bargains—long after our ears are deaf from straining for news of change—we still make bargains.

Take a limb, we say, give me the pain, we say. Take years of our lives, take as many as you need, add them where they’ll do good.

How long does a Monday take? Jacob on his spiritual hike, wrestled for a night. The woman who bled—30 years she bled—spent it all on stanching. Then a miracle after 30 years.

The drip drip of disappointment becomes an undertow, hope slips out into the deep to be fished out by who? Jonah? 

But, should I end this post this way? It seems, no. Take the long view, the larger perspective, it seems to say. Take the higher ways that aren’t our ways, those ways we know nothing about, where wisdom tells us there is deeper wisdom. And if Tuesday comes, that perspective will satisfy, even sweetly so. But if you’re stuck in Monday that abstraction could drive you mad.