What a way to start 2025! And I’m not just talking about the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans or the ongoing days of blazing fires decimating Southern California. These alone, not to mention the impending change in our realities, are making for a very turbulent beginning to this new year. The oxygen masks have fallen. My family has grabbed them. We pray.
Thursday morning, two weeks ago, after another “panic attack,” my brother-in-law checked himself into the hospital to test his heart. Just a week prior, he, my sister, and two nephews were in gorgeous and sunny, albeit giant grasshopper-filled, Costa Rica for Christmas. My brother-in-law is the ultimate trip planner: They zip-lined down a waterfall, hiked through rainforests, went white water rafting, even did a little surfing. One night there, he had woken to a “panic attack” frightening them all, more than the insects as long as an adult’s hand who were uninvited guests to their earlier supper near the beach under a star-streaked sky. Back home, he was not going to ignore another when the same “panic attack” feeling overcame him, and he checked himself into the hospital for heart tests the day after New Year’s.
The heart tests quickly led to a mandatory wheelchair to the Emergency Room where, after hours of nervous but patient waiting, more tests determined that his heart was in serious trouble. With my sister by his side, he was admitted right away. A man who eats so incredibly healthy and who daily exercises religiously discovered that two of his arteries were blocked 100%. As for the other two, 90% blockage and 80% blockage. It was shocking, to say the least.
Remarkably, his body had started creating new vessels as organic bypasses to continue the heart’s function because the blockage had built so slowly. Bodies are miraculous in their ability to evolve to survive. Unfortunately, they were not growing fast enough, and his heart was not getting the blood it needed to continue its perfect rhythm to deliver life’s blood. A wonderful cardiologist conferred with a seasoned surgeon who performed a successful quadruple bypass surgery on my brother-in-law last week. He is home now, and everyone is incredibly grateful. A new journey begins, one not without many challenges ahead. We are in ceaseless prayer.
You know, now is a good time for prayer. It’s kind of the soul’s oxygen. Grab a mask. Unfortunately, prayer has lost its value in society. Hypocritical politicians and dictators of religion have denigrated the idea of personally praying to something or someone outside of oneself who is believed to be the Creator. When I hear powerful people offer “thoughts and prayers,” it can make prayer feel meaningless primarily because their prayers never seem to broaden their perspective enough to effect fortuitous change. Which, I believe, is what prayer can do. And let’s face it, Jesus didn’t offer thoughts and prayers; he did something.
Some will say prayer is an abstract enjoining of the energies of life. A socket to a plug. I like that. Fill’er up. Some will say that it is the soul’s way of connecting with the wider spirit of one, all, our ancestors, our prophets, our saviors, the Earth, the Universe. It definitely feels beyond and within. Some will say that prayer is a human psychological delusion to force the hope humans need to survive. It must be an innate delusion, for we’ve been doing it in some form or fashion since the ancients invented time. And all of that’s fine. Personally, I choose to believe in prayer because the very act has gotten me through life. At times of my most despairing, prayer has connected me with an existential love outside of myself and encouraged me to persevere.
Quite honestly, I’ve been talking to God and sharing this life with Him (according to my own personalization of the unfathomable - cue Depeche Mode) since I can remember talking and processing thoughts. And from three through a mid-century, I have always been buoyed, my life’s narrative has been made meaningful, by choosing to believe in God and in a Creator with unconditional love for me. Prayer connects me to a heartbeat that is not my own—providing hope when I can only hope for hope. For me, prayer has been a lifeline. It is a big breath. Oxygen for my soul.
But no matter what you think of it or how you interpret it, no matter if you believe in it, at its most basic, prayer is a good way of letting go of the pressure we put on ourselves for everything to go perfectly, surrendering to something entirely out of our control to find release and relief. Like loud steam from a tea kettle calling out to Grandma, who is also warming leftover chicken and macaroni and cheese, prayer is a nurturing comfort.
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