Surfacing

There are two prayers that I hear myself praying. They are like a bit of music that plays itself in the nether part of one’s mind, noticed once in a while but not often concentrated on. One, my mother taught me. I have a memory of her at bedside of little me and my younger sister, Eileen. We weren't’t yet schoolchildren. The bed may have been my parent’s bed.  Eileen and I slept in different rooms, but mom would let us fall asleep in her and Dad’s bedroom and leave the hallway light burning to keep us from dark fears and worries. The image is a little boy in a big bed, with his mother holding his hand to his forehead shaping the letters ‘I  N  R  I’ as those shapes were on the top of the cross at the head of my parent’s bed. Not letters yet for me, I had not learned to read, nor write. But I could see the shapes on the sign above Jesus’s head, and with my finger rub the shapes on my forehead while she told me the words, in phrases that Eileen and I would say after her, that were the first shape of prayer for us

 

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, save me from a sudden and unprepared death. Lord, I know that I am going to die; when, where or how, I do not know. But if I should die before I awake, Jesus have mercy. Amen.

That’s all. I don’t think that I have ever written it down until now. I suppose out of obedience and then fear, or childhood piety, I said this prayer, and rubbed those letters on my forehead all throughout my youth.
At Parris Island, Marine Corps boot camp, even our falling asleep was done on command. All hundred of us recruits would be laying in our bunks at ATTENTION - eyes straight ahead (the white ceiling, the long fluorescent lights extinguished), arms straight along sides, thumbs aligned with side seam of government issue boxer shorts, legs straight, feet forming a forty-five degree angle - the drill instructor ordering us to recite the chain of command, “...Gunnery Sergeant Spence is our drill instructor, and he reports to Lieutenant Jeffers our platoon commander. And he reports to ...,” right on up the whole long line past the Commandant to,”...Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense and he reports to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and the President of the United States. The semifinal command of each day was to say in unison, “Good night Chesty Puller, wherever you are.” General Puller having been the “goddamndestbestmarine that ever breathed free air”. The final command from Sgt Spence was “SLEEP.” Partly out of a desire to be at least a little bit disobedient maybe, but more likely from a habit more compelling than a old wino’s, my hand would rise to sign the letters INRI, and the words of my mother taught prayer, then to troubled sleep. Through angry years of believing in nothing at all, and years of caring about less, this prayer came to mind as soon as I would put head to pillow. For years I didn't’t sign the letters to my forehead - though the hand reached for head as the words flowed silently into dimming consciousness.

The other prayer was not mother taught. I have no memory of where I learned it. But my guess is that it was taught to me by the sisters that prepared me to receive my First Holy Communion. This happened when I was six years old, the late spring of my first grade in Most Blessed Sacrament parish school. Always, always when I go to communion, and always when rising in the morning, this prayer rises from wherever forgotten words hide and comes to my lips:

Look down upon me good and gentle Jesus, whilst before thy face I humbly kneel and beseech thee to fix deep in my heart lively sentiments of faith hope and charity, with true contrition for my sins and a firm purpose of amendment. Whilst I call to mind the words David the prophet said of you my dear Jesus, ‘They have pierced my hands and my feet, they have numbered all my bones.

In childhood years, it was ‘cinnamons’. I eventually learned that the mysterious ‘cinnamons of faith, hope and charity’ were to be emotions dearly prayed for that would lead us in faith, and resolute hope toward acting lovingly. The awkward syntax that seems to have the phrase ‘...with true contrition for my....’ geographically in another country from its referent is not awkward to me at all, I know what me and the prayer mean. Even now when this prayer get said by the me that tends to memory, there is a strong accent on the word. ‘whilst’. Nowhere else in anything I’ve ever said or written has the word’ whilst’ ever come up. Maybe I didn't hear the nun properly, or maybe ‘whilst’ is just an old biblical formalism , like ‘thy and ‘thee’. Don’t know about that. Do know that that is how my prayer sounds 44 years down the decades since the little boy learned it. A few years ago I was having lunch with friend Henry Hurling some years my senior. He knew of this prayer. We laughed about the cinnamons and he said that he never knew what the ‘numbering bones’ was about until in his sixties he developed arthritis - he also says this prayer when getting out of bed in the morning. Somewhere over the years I picked up the notion that the numbering bones had to do with the dice the the Roman soldiers used  to bet on Christ’s clothing - before plastic, gambler’s dice were sawed bones with the dots painted on. Henry and I agreed that this was interesting - and potentially useful if it ever comes up on Jeopardy - but this doesn’t add much sense to anything, so we are going to stay with the arthritis exegesis till something better comes along. I suppose that it might not really matter that, as serious theologians, the two of us are as learned as Laurel and Hardy. I suppose that whether or not it makes sense - or that the sayer of these prayers knows what sense it was meant to make - is beside the point.

I am more, other, less than I will. These stubborn prayers are more sign of the faith had in me than any I profess - something of a mother’s love and the devotion of an unremembered teacher, never to not be part of  me, though a faith that often escapes me. However it happens each night, the prayer reminds me that a day is done - forever done, and the end time is a day closer. And all the days of my life, days that I believe, days that I don’t, good and lost days, I hear a child’s voice, say with fervor, ask with sincerity, for lively cinnamons of faith, hope and charity.