I am a big fan of the writings of  Anne Lamott. My copy of her book “Bird by Bird; Instructions on Life and Writing” is pretty ragged – filled with turned down corners, yellow highlighter and notated sentences. She expresses herself with this self-deprecating, honest humor and you find yourself reading a paragraph and thinking “Oh my god that is exactly how I feel.” Anne is a recovering alcoholic, a single mom, a lover of dogs, and a firm believer in a higher power.

I’ve struggled with the concepts and precepts of organized religion most of my life.  But I always felt that there had to be something “more” out there; some force that intervenes at key points in history and says “Whoops, I think you folks better go left here instead of right”. How else do you explain the presence on earth of people like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousufzai?  There are too many stories of miracles and near death experiences not to at least make you pause and wonder if there is something more out there.

Then Jordan died.

And as Alexander Hemon so eloquently describes in his account of his infant daughter’s death, we “stood in the moment that divided our lives into before and after;  where before was forever locked from entry, and after was exploding into a dark hole of pain.” And I found it impossible to believe that there was a God, or any kind of benevolent force at work. There is no meaning in Jordan’s death – just a gaping void in the world.

Eventually  I found myself envying those around me with strong faith – who were comforted by their absolute belief that Jordan is in a better place. Never having had such certainty and conviction I found myself searching for a way to find similar peace.

One evening, when we had finally reached a point that we could safely venture out in the world, we resumed our Friday night tradition of supper at McNally Robinson’s and then a long browse through the book shelves. I found myself drawn to the religious section and discovered Anne had written a new book  “Help. Thanks. Wow. The three essential prayers”.

How brilliant is that? Calling for help when you realize you, and the world, are broken beyond your ability to repair, giving thanks for blessings big and small, and expressing awe at those things that so extremely dwarf our human capabilities. To Lamott, prayer is quite simply about honesty, a desire to connect with something outside of ourselves and a willingness to invite light and air into our dark, stagnant places.

Prayer is private, even when we pray with others. It is communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding. To the Good, the force that is beyond our comprehension but that in our pain or supplication or relief we don’t need to define or have proof of any established contact with.

Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy – all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.

Most of us figure out by a certain age – some of us later than others – that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you have lovely, painful and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair.

Sometimes we find ourselves hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet, the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens and it’s all a part of the big picture.

We are too often distracted by the need to burnish our surfaces, to look good so that other people won’t know what screwed up messes we, or our mate or kids or finances, are. But if you gently help yourself back to the present moment, you see how life keeps stumbling along and how you may actually find your way through another ordinary or impossible day.

Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic.

The marvel is only partly that somehow you lured them into your web twenty years ago, forty years ago, and they totally stuck with you. The more astonishing thing is that these greatest of all possible people feel the same way about you – horrible, grim, self-obsessed you. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you.

We pray without knowing much about whom we are praying to. We pray not really knowing what to pray for. We pray not really knowing how to pray. But just as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more honesty, breathe and think more deeper, and with more attention.

Help. Thanks. Wow.

It is a work in progress.