The prayers I don't need
and un-dashed non-dreams
Caught up with my Aunt Beth this morning, who basically out-Southern-womans any Tennessee Williams character you can think of, with the sole exception of my dearly departed grandmother. Found out that when the doctors diagnosed my 2-poud born-at-6-months body with cerebral palsy, my grandmother wailed:
"My baby grandchild will never be a figure skater!”
To my dear aunt’s credit, she laughed. “I said ‘Mother! You’re from Mississippi. Do you know anybody who ice skates? We’re in the South! Nobody here knows how to ice skate!” To shine more perspective on the absurdity of my grandmother’s tragic perceptions, she said, “She ain’t gonna be a ballerina either.” As though both of these occupations are widely available to the general population.
I wonder if it’s these imagined hypothetical realities, the kind that only rarely define anyone’s lives, that inspire Christians all over the world to want to pray for me. All told, I have lived in 16 cities/towns covering every region of the US, and in every single one, I get this offer.
But it’s been a long time. Until yesterday. Yesterday, I was standing in the Whole Foods deciding on a gratuitous savory snack when an elderly woman apporached me to indicate that I needed to take my headphones off for her vital information or query, so, out of respect, I did.
“May I pray for you?” she asked.
I’m not used to this anymore, and I’ve been dramatically stressed out lately, so I was too caught off guard for cleverness. I simply said, “If you like,” and very deliberately put my headphones back on and walked away, as she was continuing to talk. What she said to me is between her and her God, because I really don’t care about the content. I can guess it. It’s old, old news, not Good News.
When I lived in Boston, a Vietnamese missionary pair of siblings caught me at a moment I felt so heart-wounded and hopeless that when they asked if they could pray for me, I said yes. They looked visibly surprised. Clearly they’d been approaching the downtrodden all day only to get turned down, but there I was, visibly one of the people that Jesus might have had to scold the villiagers for shunning, and totally down for a prayer.
I don’t rememnber what I told them I wanted or was hoping for when they joined me on the bench in the park that day, but I remember that the prayer was focused and warm, and necessitated a lot of words from God. At that point in my life I was actually upset about not having kids (good thing that was a phase because it passed rather swiftly!), and I remember that one of the reassurances I did get, from the male of the pair, was, “God wants you to be a mother.” (Again, hopefully that’s not true, or that if it was, He got over it). More meaningfully, though, they prayed intently for my peace of mind. To the extent that we can view prayer as “working,” I feel like it did: I felt cared for, I felt worth something, and I definitely felt fine with being alive, three now-unshakable truths that were crazily touch-and-go for several years there.
I feel less amenable toward the young woman in Singapore who practically caused me to fall over on an escalator when she touched my shoulder. “Jesus Christ love you!” she declared. I kept thinking, I am in Asia. How do they find me here?
Sometimes, they’re explicit about the fact that the reason why they’re praying is to fix me, meaning fix my walking, meaning take away that unsightly disability that somehow God is both responsible for and didn’t want. (Though I’ve had two unrelated people in two far apart American cities both tell me it wasn’t God who caused me to be born disabled but rather Satan/demons respectively.)
This did not happen to me in Malaysia, a majority-Muslim country. There, all I had to do was walk along the beach in the tiny town of Teluk Bahang, and a woman in hijab approached me almost breathlessly. “Excuse me,” she said. “Can I ask you something?” For a moment, I looked down at my hideous-but-modest shorts and wondered if I had made a wardrobe mistake, careful as I had been to cover all body parts that respect dictated I cover. Of course I said yes.
“My son was born with cerebral palsy,” she told me. “And I work with the Panang Center for Spastic Children. May I take your picture for their…” she reached mentally for the word. “Motivation?” (She might have meant inspiration.) She added that she was thrilled to see me walking around so easily, and by myself.
She took my photo, and then asked, with the same excited nervousness one might have in their voice for a celebrity, if she and I could take a selfie together, which we did. She captioned it, “Sarah from California,” which, though inaccurate, was healing in the moment because I didn’t feel connected at all at that point with anywhere you might call my hometown (born: New Orleans raised: Albuquerque lived: all over) and so it was a pleasure to be baptized Sarah from California by this warm, vibrant, radiantly genuine human being.
It wasn’t a literal prayer. But it did everything a prayer is supposed to do.
