Thoughts and Prayers

It’s gotten all jumbled up, so I don’t know where to start. We were whizzing through the sky, the four of us, and the inconveniences of our squished seats seemed small as we thought about the little boy. Or: Tears punctuated the rosary as each of those gathered knelt before the small casket. Or: My wife wailed as she questioned God — why aren’t all healed? Or: I hadn’t seen the boy since summer, his lips covered in the sticky remnants of patriotic popsicle and his hands holding a coveted football.

The question throughout was: What are we supposed to do? I had no idea, but I kept telling Regina, “We need to pray.” It was a surprising thing for me to hear myself say, for even years after I became a Catholic, I didn’t pray — didn’t know what it was for or why anyone would do it. I remember once when Regina and I had first started dating, she told me a heartfelt story about the power of prayer in her sister’s life, and I replied with blunt skepticism. There was, I pronounced with unrecognized arrogance, definitely another explanation. (A double arrogance, for I was not only ignorant about prayer, but also ignorant of what the other explanation would be.) By the grace of God, Regina stuck with me, and now we sat hand in hand by the fireplace of my childhood home, murmuring the rosary with great hope, full of grace, begging for the promise of salvation now and at the hour of our death, a death which seemed more profoundly and unimaginably real as the boy’s body was latched to earthly life with wires and tubes.

This strange desire to do something reminded me of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. In the wake of Mr. Shimerda’s death, young Jim is left alone at the house as his family travels the icy road to see the Shimerda family. He recounts:

They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought... I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the house.

I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar, and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn, emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions. I got ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed upon me that if Mr. Shimerda’s soul were lingering about in this world at all, it would be here, in our house

There’s something strange about the way that death releases its sufferer from all mortal considerations while obligating those left behind to mundane practicalities or bureaucratic nightmares. Some seem to thrive on the piles of paperwork and deluge of decisions, as if the big business of death and its many calls to action might offer some comfortable refuge — sign here, sir, and sorry for your loss. But the solace of frenetic activity is transient and illusory, and soon enough the stillness comes, and we come to see — like Jim — that the question plaguing us is not what to do about what has been left behind, but rather what to think about what carries on.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him. I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground, always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house. There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that Ántonia had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game—belonging, as Ántonia said, to the ‘nobles’—from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.

I can call so few memories of the boy to mind, and it is a source of great sadness for me to reckon with the notion that an age which ought to be defined by firsts has become a temple in which his parents preserve the lasts: His last words, his last laugh, last smile, last kiss, last snuggle, last bedtime story, last mass, last breath — at the age of five. But it is a source of great solace to me that his parents know that he has experienced the mysterious unity of Christmas and Easter in a way that he understands more fully than any of us. Amidst the octave of our Lord’s birth, he participated in the great gift of the Lord’s resurrection.

Thoughts and prayers are often derided and mocked in our culture, and it’s understandable: For those who deny the soul — who deny anything immaterial, who deny God — prayer is pointless. But kneel before a diminutive casket and cry at the boy’s body and ask: Do we cry because we’ve lost what’s here or because we’ve lost what’s gone? There are no materialists or atheists at the funeral of a dead child. Anyone who stands in this place will know there is a soul — will see the face of God and find faith in life everlasting — will discover the treasure in earthen vessels — will understand that what is most real is that which is not seen — will fall on knees and pray for God’s mercy and grace for this boy and for ourselves.

And at last, perhaps they will come to believe even that hard teaching — the one that even the disciplines found it hard to accept: We encounter Christ’s body and Christ’s divinity in the Eucharist. The most surprising thing turns out not to be simply that the spiritual world is real, but that we can encounter it in something as humble as the host. And indeed, our bodies can become the tabernacle for our redeemer — as this boy’s body was in his last days on earth.

When I was a little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By ‘n’ by war-times come, when the Prussians fight us. We have very many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp, and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and it preserve us.

Those who mock prayer often demand in its place action — as if there could be anything more efficacious than communion with God, for it is His thought, His will, His love that is the law of all creation. All prayer is praise, and with the proper faith we can praise the Lord even in the midst of our sorrow — for the peace, after all, surpasses all understanding.

None of us should wish for death, for God has gifted life to us to steward for his greater glory. However, none of us need fear death either, since the God of mercy clothes in light those who pass through the unknown darkness. Though I weep as I write, I rejoice that the boy is delighting in the Lord, and as we meekly pray for him, he prays mightily for us.

Rest in peace, MJK.