Remembering to Pray

By Roy Hoffman, NY Times, Feb. 4, 2014 Sometimes, toward end of day, I jog on a beach nearby on Mobile Bay. As the sun is sinking I look out at the pelicans wheeling in the sky, the fishermen on Fairhope Pier casting their nets, sailboats and channel markers changing to silhouette. Like many who make their way here to enjoy sunset, snapping photos, sipping cocktails, relaxing on benches, I find this light on water a joy to behold. I breathe deeply as I run—the Gulf Coast winter is mild, a sweatshirt enough to ward off the chill—and feel happy just to be alive. I am in good health, enjoy a loving family and many trusted friends. I have worked as journalist, novelist, teacher, had great jobs, lost others; made more money, less money. I’ve traveled the world. On this day, I sprint up a hill and come to a promontory looking out to the sweep of the bay, the horizon red and orange, and another impulse comes up in me. It is not enough to take a photo, call a friend, jot a line in my notebook, be philosophical. Like the light, the feeling is orchestral, a welling-up of emotion. I want to speak in a way that used to be easy for me as a child: silently, intensely, embracing the mysteries. I want to pray. It is a matter of remembering, after so long, just how. Lighting Sabbath candles, being bar mitzvahed, participating in the temple youth group. I grew up in Mobile with a clear sense of religious conviction. As a Jew in the Bible Belt, I was in a minority. There are 9,000 of us in Alabama, a state of four million people, a quarter of them Southern Baptist. While some Christians worried for me, even preached to me, because I was not “saved,” others were curious, respectful. I was, after all, often the only Jew they knew. As years went on, I took a course in comparative religion, enjoyed religious holidays, Passover in particular, and identified proudly with my faith. But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped truly praying. Indeed, I wasn’t so sure about God at all. The matter seemed irrelevant. I was too busy. The biggest fight I ever had with my father was shortly after I turned 21, when, drunk on a bottle of whiskey a friend had given me for my birthday, I proclaimed myself an atheist. He followed me into the backyard, and outraged, pinned me against the fence. His parents had fled Eastern Europe because of their beliefs. Who was I to dismiss them? I expressed my contempt for all that was conventional. His faith, I told him, was a crutch. An opiate. I had heard that somewhere before. In the decades that followed, awed by time’s extremes—becoming a parent, losing a parent—and feeling my own mortality, I eventually found my way back to believing, but for a long time not with the same fervor. Working as a writer for my hometown newspaper in Mobile, I was asked, in 2009, to cover the religion beat. For the next three years, until becoming a casualty of newspaper layoffs, I carried my reporter’s pad into a plenitude of Catholic and Protestant churches, Mobile’s two synagogues, a mosque, a Buddhist temple and the homes of Hindus and Baha’i. Southern Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Church of Christ, Church of God, AME, AME Zion, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Greek Orthodox, Pentecostals, Holiness, nondenominationals—the Deep South’s religiosity was everywhere. There were stories that broke my heart, like the one of a Methodist pastor in north Alabama who had to find strength in her faith when her little girl was killed in a tornado; and others that intrigued me, like the jailhouse conversion of a Klansman. I was skeptical, but deeply curious, seeing people all around me healed during a tent revival. When I shadowed a hospital chaplain, I watched patients, without doubt, perk up at his arrival. During Ramadan, invited to the home of a Turkish couple to write about their meal after a day of fasting, I not only enjoyed a rare, Middle Eastern feast in south Alabama, but also appreciated their devotion to Islam. I became fascinated by the intensity, in all varieties, of prayer. And I’ve had my share of people praying for me, never asking about my own beliefs. In Monroeville, Ala., I reported on Pilots for Christ, aviators who transport, free, cancer patients and others for treatment where needed. Before lunch, during grace, a pilot thanked God that I would enable more people to know about their mission, and asked for my divine protection. After 60 years cloistered in a convent in Mobile, four Carmelite nuns visited with me one afternoon to tell about their lives devoted to prayer. Sister Rose, Sister Marie Therese, Sister Genevieve and Sister Elias, with an average age of 80, were no longer able to sustain their community. They had just moved to a nuns retirement home. They told me about their decades behind the enclosure, and how they learned of people’s needs while staying isolated behind high walls. People would write down prayer requests and put them on a revolving shelf called “a turn” in the convent wall. As we spoke I felt their sweetness, and intensity. In prayer they had found their calling. In prayer they had spent their lives. When we said goodbye, they said, “God bless you.” I felt lifted up. Other people’s prayers have made me feel closer to my own. I love the recitations at Sabbath services at my congregation, the communal feeling of voices raised together in Hebrew and English and the cantor’s chant. And some prayers, in the sanctuaries of my making, like the bay at sunset, are the ones I compose. Lines of the Psalms, images of nature, meditations that flow from the moment at hand: They move through me, silent yet resonant, a contemplation of mysteries that provide me, on a pilgrimage of a simple afternoon, a sense of exaltation. “Dear God,” I begin, ”Whatever we call you / Wherever we find you / in the laughter of our children / the tenderness of our parents / the strength of our brothers and sisters and friends/the closeness of our companions and husbands and wives. / In the arc of the pelican/the leap of the mullet, / the perfect sunny day / or incoming storm / In whatever ways we understand you, / in a church or synagogue or mosque, / or on a beach beneath a starry sky, / we offer gratitude for this day.”