On Wings of Doubtful Prayer

We’re told that the cry of the poor reaches the heavens and does not return until it has done its work.   I think we’re taken there too, when the poor who cry out in prayer is us.

The question of God answering our prayers is perhaps akin to that of asking why a loving God would allow tragedies.  When I read this chapter of Sirach, there is a part of me that wings heavenward, and a part of me that remains here in the mire of doubt. 

I watched a film, simply entitled “Paris” in the opening scene of which a character is told that he has a potentially fatal heart condition.  He wanders

through a kind of flaccidity that is in bold contrast to the lithe, staccato dance of his troupe that is interwoven with the scene of the ultrasound of his heart and the concerned look of his cardiologist.  For me, it was not dance, but biking, roofing, moving heavy lumber, and anything else that I was inclined to do.  And upon hearing the preliminary cautions of my own doctor, a calm flaccidity entered me, too.  Like Pierre in the film, I began to see.  It took him the entire film.  It took me the drive home, because I had had experience with awareness of mortality.

Kathy’s experiences with some health issues ten years ago made me wonder whether our dream of growing old together might be stolen by circumstance.  I began blinking away tears seeing old couples, the holiness of their companionship.  Now as my own health issues began to emerge, I was again aware of how much we take for granted.  In the closing scene Pierre is in a taxi on his way to the hospital for a heart transplant.  He sees Paris, and realizes that we don’t see it.  “They don’t know how lucky they are”, he says, “walking, breathing, running….”  He sees with a certain unveiled clarity, a complete lack of inhibition.  He looks unblinkingly at a young couple in a restaurant, arousing an equally open look from the woman and a questioning regard from her companion.  He lies on his back in the back seat of the taxi, looking up at the blue sky, the soft clouds.  A smile transforms his face to peace, to joy, to calm delight and contentedness.  I think that the film followed the journey of his prayer to heaven, and its return when it had done its work.  

When we cast our prayer to heaven, perhaps to a God whose compassion we question, if not his very existence, part of us goes with the prayer, leaves earth, life, Paris, or wherever we are.  Part of us is elsewhere.  My friend Hugh at Manresa reminded me in his weekly reflection that our prayers are answered not on our time, but in eternity.  It took the length of the film for Pierre’s prayer to return to him.  Did he survive the operation?  Would he live?

Somehow the look on his face, in the blinking of light through the shadows of the buildings on that Paris street, makes the answer unimportant.  He was being carried on the very wings of his own prayer.  We are lifted on the wings of the very prayer we toss up, too.  However dubious its lofting by our frail humanity, we ride on its wings, and do not return until its work is done.  Part of us is carried, even or perhaps especially when the other parts of us doubt.