The Prayer I Rewrote in My Own Words
The old formula stopped working, so I drafted an honest one.
For thirty one years I prayed the same forty two words my mother taught me, and on the night my marriage ended I discovered they had stopped meaning anything at all. I knelt beside the guest bed, because by then I was sleeping in the guest bed, and my mouth ran the prayer the way a body runs an escalator that has broken down: the motion continued... but nothing was carrying me anywhere.
Daniel had told me at dinner. He was decent about it, which somehow made it worse. He loaded the dishwasher first. Then he sat down across from me, folded his hands like a loan officer, and explained that he had been unhappy for four years, which meant that for four years I had been living inside a life that only one of us believed in.
That night I said the words. Our Father... Hallowed be... Give us this day. My mother taught me the prayer when I was five, kneeling on carpet the color of butterscotch, and I had said it every night since, through exams and funerals and a wedding, the way you keep a fire alarm on the ceiling: not because you think about it, but because it is supposed to go off when everything burns.
Everything was burning. The alarm made no sound.
Two weeks later a storm took the power out. This matters because I am the kind of person who fills silence with television, and suddenly there was no television, no hum from the refrigerator, nothing but rain and a house that had one toothbrush in it. I found the emergency candle in the junk drawer, an ugly white pillar from some forgotten winter, and I lit it and sat at the kitchen table because the couch still smelled like him.
I tried the prayer again. I got as far as thy will be done and something in me said, out loud, in my empty kitchen:
I don't actually know if I mean that.
The candle didn't flicker. No thunder answered. But it was the first honest sentence I had said to God in months... maybe years, and it cracked something open.
There was a legal pad on the table, the one I had been using to list assets like a widow doing inventory, and I turned to a clean page and wrote at the top: Dear God. Then, because honesty was apparently the new policy, I wrote the second line: I am not fine, and I think you already know whose fault I think that is.
I wrote for an hour by candlelight. It was not reverent. I complained. I accused. I used a word my mother would have left the room over. I told God that Daniel folded his hands like a loan officer, and that I had worn the wrong dress to my own wedding because his mother preferred it, and that I could not remember the last decision I had made that was entirely mine.
At the bottom I wrote Amen, the way you slam a door, and I blew out the candle and slept eight hours for the first time since dinner.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part that sounds tidy, and it wasn't. I did not become a person who journals at dawn in linen. What happened was smaller and stranger: the next night, with the power back on, I turned off the lights anyway, lit the ugly candle, and wrote another one.
They became a habit before they became a practice.
A page a night, sometimes three lines, always starting Dear God, always by candle, because the candle made it a room inside the room. Weeks in, I found the phrase for it in a church newsletter my aunt kept mailing me: personal prayer writing, printed under a clip art dove. I laughed at the dove. I kept writing.
Somewhere around the second month I started rewriting the old prayer itself, line by line, in my own words, like translating a language I had spoken but never understood. Give us this day our daily bread became: help me want only today, because I keep trying to eat next year and it is making me sick. Lead us not into temptation became: keep me off his social media after ten p.m. Thy will be done stayed blank... for a long time. I drew a horizon line under it and left it.
Then I hit the forgiveness clause, and the whole project stalled like a car on train tracks.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. As. That little word is a hinge with a knife in it. I could not write it honestly, because I had not forgiven him, and the prayer as my mother taught it made my forgiveness the going rate for my own. For three weeks I wrote around that line the way you walk around a hole in the floor. Finally, one night in October, I wrote the truest version I had: I am not ready to forgive him. Please treat me better than I am currently able to treat anyone. It was months more before I could write anything gentler, and when I finally could, I understood why forgiveness has its own shelf in every tradition on earth. It is not one decision. It is a word you have to keep translating.
A borrowed prayer can carry you for years, but there is a door at the end of it that only your own words will open.
By spring the legal pad had become three legal pads, and some of the prayers had started arriving with line breaks, which is how I discovered, at forty one, that I had been writing poems. A friend who actually is a poet read a few and said the thing friends say, you should put these somewhere, and I did the bravest thing I have done since the dinner: I posted one on a community wall for poets, under my real name, with my real doubt in it. It was the rewritten forgiveness line, all its drafts stacked like tree rings, from I am not ready down to the version I could finally stand behind.
Four days later a stranger left a comment. She said she had read it in a hospital waiting room in Ohio, at two in the morning, while her father was in surgery, and that she had prayed my prayer because her own words wouldn't come.
I sat with my phone in my lap for a long time after that.
Thirty one years of borrowing my mother's prayer, and now somebody in Ohio was borrowing mine. That is apparently how the whole thing works, a relay of words passed hand to hand, each of us carrying somebody's sentences until we can write our own. The rewriting hadn't been a rebellion after all. It was the tradition, doing what it has always done. That was the night I stopped thinking of the candle as grief equipment and started thinking of it as part of my healing, deliberate as physical therapy.
My mother visited in June. She heard me through the guest room door, reading that night's page out loud the way I do now, and at breakfast she said, gently, with her spoon halfway to her mouth: that's not how the prayer goes.
I poured her coffee. Outside, the neighbor's sprinkler was ticking across the lawn like a slow clock.
It is now, I said.
And she looked at me for a moment, and then she asked me to write one for her.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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