Pray for Me by Rick Hamlin- Book Excerpt

FaithWords
Jul 27, 2017 · 18 min read
Pray for Me: Finding Faith in a Crisis by Rick Hamlin

Prologue

It’s not what you do, it’s what God does. It’s not how hard you try, it’s how willing you are not to try. It’s not all about believing when believing comes hard. It’s all about trusting that what little faith you bring to the table is enough, more than enough, the mustard seed of a banquet (and I don’t even like mustard).

You’re not very good at this, as you tell yourself and others. You sit there on the sofa in the early morning with your eyes closed, your legs crossed, yearning for the divine, and you immediately think of all the things you need to get done that day, the meeting that’s supposed to happen, the e‑mails you must send, the person you should talk to, the seminar you forgot to put on the calendar. That reminds you of the person you said you would get together with whom you haven’t gotten together with just yet, and you want to be perceived as a person of your word, so you feel you should get in touch instead of just letting it go.

You’ve only been there on that sofa for less than a minute, the sun barely glimpsed over the horizon, and you’re already off to the races, the superego riding its mangy horse, hurtling down a well-traveled track, tossing up dust and mud. You think of the check you need to write, a bill you haven’t paid; you mentally compute the money in your account, trying to figure out if you can cover it or let it slide. And while you’re at it, you wonder how much you’ve managed to squirrel away in your retirement account and really how much you could take out annually if this stock market continues on its wild roller-coaster ride. Maybe if you were a better money manager you would feel more secure.

Even though this time, this dedicated time, is not about being secure financially; it’s a moment you’ve promised yourself to look to higher things, to connect with a higher power. Why are you wasting it worrying about money and the mortgage and your 401(k)? Do you think Jesus really cares about the S&P or the Dow Jones any more than he cares about people who have too little to even invest in a retirement fund?

You don’t want to be this way. You wish you could be like the widow with her mighty mite, putting it in the offering plate, hoping not to be noticed, giving all she has out of love and belief.

The only thing you share with her is an abiding humility. You would be as glad not to be noticed in any Heavenly Competition for Radical Holiness. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you are bragging, because you have very little to brag about. Just because you said you write about prayer — to that person at the dinner party who asked you what kind of things you wrote — you wouldn’t want her or anyone else to think you’re above the fray. It’s not like you don’t suffer from the same worries as the rest of us or nurture the same envies or have moments you’d rather not mention of woe-begotten shame.

The irony is not lost on you that to be someone who says they write about prayer is to put yourself in an attention-getting realm with holy know‑it‑all status that is contrary to all that prayer is and does. You don’t generally go for people who apologize for who they are before they tell you who they are; their humility is to be as little trusted as the correspondent who signs off, “Humbly yours.” If you call attention to your humility, how humble can you really be?

You have your doubts about how prayer works, although God forbid you should waste your time identifying them, raising them to an exalted level far beyond their status or worth, because what you really have is belief, and that’s what you want to share more than anything else. It was the gift given to you, the pearl beyond price that merits selling all you have and all you possess and it only increases in value as you give it away. It is the most important thing about you. It is your treasure and the source of all you treasure. Something will happen when you’re sitting on that couch. In that twenty minutes there will be a glimmer (or there won’t) of something far beyond you, a rent in the fabric, a piercing through the veil, an instant of calm, a sign of reassurance, a signal of connection, a peace that passes all understanding, a breath of fresh air, a touch across the cheek, an awakening of the heart, a sigh, a sensation.

Or, as I say, it won’t be there. You’re not there for that. It’s a bonus, a fringe benefit, as a woman I worked with once said, describing the fur coat she wore, a gift from her husband. I question the merit of surveys on prayer’s effectiveness in combating a plethora of complaints, from high blood pressure to depression to heart disease — and hey, I’ve known all three. How nice, I think, that someone can find something that’s quantifiable about prayer. How great for the what’s‑in‑it‑for‑me seeker. How illuminating for the science section of the newspaper. But it would be like getting married because you’re told that married people live longer, happier, healthier lives than unmarried people, and you feel that you should acquire for yourself the same benefits. What about love? What about heedless passion? What about unbridled fun? (You’re hearing from a man who loves being married.)

I smile when I pray. At least it feels like I do. My body smiles. I don’t hold up a mirror to see and I’ve never had myself photographed praying, although a young colleague of mine wants to do it for a series of portraits of people in prayer. “I’m not sure I can pray if I know someone is taking pictures of me,” I said. Once a New York Times photographer wanted to do that, take a picture of me praying on the New York City subway because I like to pray on the subway train. I told the man that he could photograph me reading psalms from my little pocket Bible — no problem — but he couldn’t take a picture of me praying there. It would be phony, a charade, like simulated sex in a Hollywood movie. My eyes closed, my head bowed, I’d be listening to the click of the shutter, not God.

I read of a study once — talk about scientific studies — about the benefits of stretching before and/or after vigorous exercise. The researcher was trying to find out if those who stretched suffered from fewer running injuries than those who didn’t. As I remember, the study was inconclusive. You couldn’t prove anything. The message to me: You stretch because it increases your range of motion. It feels good.

Prayer feels good. You’re getting in touch with a larger part of yourself. You’re putting things into perspective. You’re reaching out for the divine. You’re listening to yourself — yes, all those piddling anxieties and worries, and the not‑so‑piddling ones, that you’re going to drop into the lap of the Most Holy and leave them behind as much as is possible or at least until you sit on the sofa again, or the subway or the chair in your office or in your kitchen beneath the ticking clock or in the pew in the empty church or in the folding chair in the twelve-step meeting. This is your holy place, your stretching time.

You’re not there to get the great idea for your next novel or what to say at the meeting you’ll lead on Thursday or the PowerPoint presentation you have to make. You’re not even there to get some clever insight into the spiritual life. The point of prayer is not to watch yourself praying. You’re not going to leap off the pillow to rush into the spiritual growth seminar, waving your hand, dying to be called on, saying, “The most amazing thing happened to me when I was praying this morning.” OK, you might just do that, but don’t plan on it. Don’t listen to what you’re thinking about the divine. Just listen.

Amazing things will happen. Indeed the great idea for the novel and a whole series of novels or screenplays might come to you. The brainstorm that you’ve been waiting for will surely descend; the dedicated silence of your prayer session could be a spawning ground for a host of fertile notions, no doubt about it, but you don’t need to make huge demands on prayer. Let it deliver what it has to offer, and what it has to offer is itself.

The farmer tills the soil, plants the seed, waters it or waits for the rain to fall. The farmer works hard, but the wondrous thing that happens isn’t anything he could do on his own. A tendril pushes up through the ground, the sun shines on it, the rain falls, leaves burst out, branches grow, the stalk rises, blossoms spring forth and fall, fruit fills their place, pulling nutrients from the sky and soil, until the glorious day of the harvest comes, baskets and bins filled to the brim. The miracle is nothing the farmer did; it was done for him.

Put yourself in a place and space where wonders are done for you, where better things will befall you than you would dare ask for, where love prospers and hope flourishes and goodness prevails, where worries about the future are few because the day itself is a source of joy.

Chapter One: The ER

Here’s a leg on my journey of prayer that I need to put down, a time of the worst and the best all at once, an episode worth analyzing, although I dread doing it. I often write to get rid of fears or at least to shrink them into manageable size. There on paper they won’t haunt me. They are simply words on a page. Once I asked a best-selling author, “Do you ever pray?” “When I write I pray,” he said. I thought I understood what he meant. Anything that requires that level of trust as you gaze into the unknown is prayer. You can’t go forward without it.

When I think about writing this, I start talking myself out of it: Don’t write about that medical crisis. Don’t go there. Who wants to know that you almost died? You’re alive now, so it’s ancient history. You don’t want to relive it anyway. It’s over, done with. Why wrestle with it? Why do you feel you must give it some meaning on the page? That’s so tiresome. You’re still processing it anyway. Let it rest. Give it another ten or twenty years. (Twenty years? Geez, I don’t even know if I’ll be around in twenty years.) Your readers don’t know you all that well. Most of them don’t know you at all. How is this going to help them?

Would that I could say like Jesus, “Satan, get behind me,” because the dark passages of our lives, when shared, can become healing passages of our lives, for us and for others. I will tell it straight up, and you can decide yourself if it’s one long organ recital, as in “Can you top this medical disaster story?” or if it was indeed a winding path of prayer. Forgive me for going into clinical details.

It began two years ago — or at least this part of the story began — witha boil on the back of my leg. It looked like some sort of ingrown hair. (Nice.) “That’s looking pretty ugly,” my wife, Carol, said, “you should go get that checked out.” This being the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, the only place I could think of that would be open was the urgent care facility on 165th Street, around the corner from the Art Deco remains of the Audubon Ballroom (where Malcolm X was shot). The urgent-care place is affiliated with and across the street from the sprawling New York–Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, where all my doctors work. If I could go anywhere, I wanted to be in a spot where they could access my medical records at the click of a computer key.

We live about fifteen minutes away. I jogged down Broadway, past bodegas and Laundromats, a parking garage, and an Irish pub, people pushing strollers and shopping carts. I signed in. Didn’t have to wait long.

A young doctor checked me out, said that yes, it looked infected, and prescribed two antibiotics. I picked up the pills at Hilltop Pharmacy near our house and started taking them that day. I felt pretty good the rest of the weekend, and the boil looked like it was shrinking.

On Sunday we went to church and that afternoon I visited a homebound ninety-four-year-old parishioner, Wesley, who’d served with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. He was also a superb musician. We sang, as always, a few hymns together — he harmonized from his hospital bed. Too weak to sit up, he could still hold the baritone line. I headed home. Carol and I watched TV that night, an episode of Broadchurch, a creepy British mystery series. The next day, Labor Day, I ran some errands, did the laundry, went for a run, washed some windows, vacuumed. So much for a laborless holiday.

On Tuesday I went to work but found myself getting really chilly in the air-

conditioned office. I just couldn’t get myself warm. Wishing I’d brought a sweater, I wrapped my hands around a mug of tea. “Isn’t it cold in here?” I asked my colleagues. “Aren’t you freezing?” They humored me but nobody readily agreed. “You probably have a fever,” I told myself, gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering, bouncing my legs at my desk to get them warm. Even so, I had no intention of heading home early. There was work to do, five days of it that had to be crammed into a four-day workweek. I’m an editor at Guideposts magazine and just because the world took off for Labor Day didn’t mean that our deadlines disappeared. In some faintly puritanical stance, I hesitated about taking an ibuprofen because it seemed like doing that would simply mask the fever rather than make it go away.

I left work at the usual hour, shivering on the subway ride home, ate dinner, took my temperature, finally — yes,I had a fever — and went to bed. Carol’s medical advice has always been to give in to whatever you’ve got sooner rather than later, because you’ll get rid of it sooner rather than later. Don’t soldier on. Go to bed immediately, take a sick day. Not that I always follow this good advice, but I did then.

I called in sick on Wednesday, the fever not diminishing despite the ibuprofen I was now popping every four hours. I went back to the urgent-care place. They said, “Keep taking the antibiotics.” On Thursday I got an appointment with my internist, whose office is in the hospital complex. I like Seth a lot. He’s warm, caring, wise, and wry. He’s always overbooked, but it’s never stopped him from giving his full attention to his patients or insisting, as he once did at the end of a session, on showing me a funny video clip on his computer that I watched over his shoulder while his ever-patient assistants were rolling their eyes and pointing to the clock. I try not to call him Seth but Doctor because I want him to know I respect him and esteem him, but I think of him as Seth.

“It’s freezing in here,” I said to his assistant when I checked in. The fever speaking.

“Sit in the waiting room,” she said. “It’s warm in there. The air conditioner isn’t working.”

“Give him my sweatshirt,” Seth called from his office. They gave me a big gray sweatshirt with New York–Presbyterian written on it in red, some swag from a medical conference, I figured. I took a selfie, the coddled patient, and texted it to Carol: “Look what Seth loaned me.”

When Seth finally examined me, he listened to my lungs, switched me off one of the antibiotics, had me do some blood tests, and said I might have pneumonia. He sent me to the lab to get a chest X‑ray, but all I really wanted to do was get home, get warm, and get in bed. Plenty of rest was the order of the day. He’d let me know if the blood tests showed anything.

“What shall I do with the sweatshirt?” I asked.

“Keep it,” he said.

I nursed myself at home on Friday, piling blankets on top of blankets, sipping mugs of tea and broth, even in the warm September weather, and taking these big ibuprofen horse pills. But the fever only got worse. On Saturday morning it spiked at 104.2, with no sign of diminishing. “I should go to the ER,” I said to Carol. It was around 11:00 a.m.

“I’m coming with you,” she said. “We’ll take a cab.”

You know it’s bad when a tightwad and public transportation junkie like me makes no objections to taking a cab, instead of a bus, the fifteen blocks to the hospital.

We got out at the wrong corner and had to walk half a block more — it felt like half a mile — to the entrance of the emergency room. I expected the usual long wait, like trying to flag down a salesperson at Macy’s the week before Christmas, but we sat in the anteroom for less than fifteen minutes before I was admitted. I guess they could tell I was pretty bad off, every breath becoming a struggle, my body trembling to stay warm.

Half aware, half in a daze, I felt myself slipping down mortality’s rabbit hole with no desire to reach out to the divine.

How can I explain this? How can I show it? It’s at the crux of what I struggle to understand about prayer and the life of the spirit. When my body goes, my faith goes too, and long-practiced spiritual habits hardly count. I remembered this from open-heart surgery. When I’m really sick — and I was really sick then, sicker than I’d ever been — my spirit diminishes. The world becomes smaller, and all my internal anguish takes over. I am not a holy person at all but some poor soul caught in a trap. I want to be able to cry out to God but I can’t. I monitor the downward spiral I’m being sucked into, and find no means of salvation. I’ve read about the saints who found pain and suffering a means for drawing closer to the Lord of sorrows, the one who died on a cross for us. But physical suffering isolates me from such love and solace. I am consumed with myself and forget about my Maker. When I think about dying, this is what worries me most. That I would become such a stranger to myself. Am I just a sunshine patriot and no winter soldier? Is not my faith bigger than this?

Did I think I was dying? Not then. My brain sank into a fog. The techs and nurses put me on oxygen and an IV drip. We were lodged in a cubicle with curtains at the sides, a pod with other patients across from me and Carol in a chair next to me. Everything was illuminated with bright lights whether we were awake or asleep. They hustled me off on a gurney or in a wheelchair for an echocardiogram — I think — and a lung X‑ray. They took my temperature and drew blood. The nurses and doctors came and went. I dozed and stared and wondered how long I would have to stay in the ER. Surely they would admit me into the hospital. Maybe they would send me home. What time was it? Couldn’t Carol go home? Much of this is fuzzy to me, but then there were moments I was acutely aware of.

I remember when the aides were decking me out in a gown and those non- slippery socks they give you in hospitals. “Not the yellow ones,” one woman said to another. “Those are only for the violent ones.” I looked at the multi-tattooed patient across from me, a kid who appeared to be strung out on a drug overdose, rattled and shaking. He had yellow socks. A violent one?

The woman next to me was ninety-nine years old — I heard her say that — and I hoped for her sake she could go home and die in her bed rather than his place. She was in a plain gown with brown socks. The woman across from us, in her mere seventies I supposed, resented being told that she was being sent to the hospital’s uptown outpost. “I want to stay right here. I don’t want to go to the Allen Pavilion,” she said, as though she were being asked to shop at a suburban branch of Saks when she was at the Fifth Avenue store.

I must have been seen by more than one doctor, but the only one I remember was a young one with blondish- brown hair, a three-day beard, and a bad bedside manner. He talked to the nurse or Carol about what grave trouble I was in, as though I were too far gone to understand his words, like talking about a deaf person in front of them. I recall him saying my condition was critical, and I realized the adjective had a very specific meaning here, like when they say on the news, “The victim was taken to the hospital and remains in critical condition.”

He took my blood pressure. “Ninety over fifty,” he said.

“Wow, that’s pretty good,” I thought to myself. “I’ve been trying to get it down.” Like an anorexic on deathwatch, congratulating herself for being a skeletal eighty-nine pounds.

The endless afternoon and evening wore on. Carol must have gone out to get some food. I don’t remember eating, myself. Our twenty-five-year-old son, Timothy, was living with us at the time — and soon to leave on a ten-month mission trip to South Africa. Carol let him know where we were. He texted or called from Brooklyn, where he was at a party with his girlfriend. “Should I come by the hospital?” he asked. “You don’t need to,” Carol texted back. He knew her and me better than that and showed up at the ER after midnight. I remember him being there. I remember him talking to Carol and me. And then he left.

At 2:00 a.m. they finally admitted me.

I was taken to the step- down unit of the ICU on the sixth floor. They pushed me in a wheelchair on the sky-bridge across Fort Washington Avenue. I’d seen it from below many times but had never been on it. It was the middle of the night and the corridor was lit up like the inside of a refrigerator. I could see the lights of the hospital out the windows, and it seemed as enchanted as the Emerald City. I think of a friend’s mother who, when given last rites, exclaimed in wonder, “I’ve never done this before!” Another friend tells the story of his ailing ninety-three-year-old mother being airlifted off of Martha’s Vineyard to get emergency medical care, her last flight on earth, and all she could say about it was, “That was the first time I’ve ever been on a helicopter!”

Perhaps that’s how the spirit speaks when you’re not conscious of making any prayer and feel incapable of it. You can still see things to marvel at. I wanted to turn to the aide pushing my wheelchair and tell him, “Gosh, I’ve never been on this bridge before.” But the mask blowing oxygen into my lungs didn’t allow for talking.

On the other side of the bridge, in the step-down unit, I kissed Carol good-bye or, more likely, she kissed me because of my oxygen mask. “Go home. Get some sleep,” I wanted to say, although I couldn’t really speak.

The next morning, Sunday, September 13, Carol sent the first of her mass e‑mails:

Dear ones, forgive the mass e‑mail but this is the easy way to start this news moving around. Please feel free to forward this e‑mail — I started with a bare-​bones approach.

Rick has had pneumonia since Thursday and took a turn for the worse yesterday. We went to the emergency room at Columbia-Presbyterian, and at

length he was admitted to a step-down unit — a slightly tamer version of the ICU. He is getting great care. He is very sick. Sepsis was one diagnosis, along with pneumonia, but he was having trouble getting oxygen. When I left him a few hours ago he had on a device that blows oxygen into his lungs.

That’s all I can tell you now, but I will keep you apprised, probably via a blast e‑mail. Add names if you like.

He doesn’t have a phone at his bed (retro!) but he will have access to his cell. Right now he’s so sick I don’t dare leave it there with him. Ditto computer. Tim is here and we will probably tag team for the next few days.

No visits or phone calls for now but I will pass along messages. E‑mails to me might be best — I can print them out and take them to him.

I know you want to know what you can do. If you are praying people, do that. Otherwise, keep us in your thoughts.

Lots of love to you all.

Carol

P.S.: I am not really taking calls either but I am texting madly. Always assuming I remember to charge my phone!


If you enjoyed reading PRAY FOR ME: Finding Faith in a Crisis by Rick Hamlin, it is available in hardcover and ebook formats at all major retailers, including:

Copyright 2017 Hachette Book Group

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