My Daily Supplications

My Irish descended mother and father raised me Catholic. No great mystery that. I was baptized shortly after birth in the waters of their faith. Later came catechism classes and my first question of a religious nature: "How could God be without beginning and without end?" The nun who I asked this burning inquiry of brushed me off without meeting my gaze. "You need only believe," said she. Thus was I introduced to the world of blind faith. I would later reject such tenets of my parent's religion in the onset of my teens. I would adopt instead an adamant stance; there was no such thing as God.

I remember with clarity that Sunday morning when seated upon a church pew I resolved to no longer believe in a deity. The sun through the stained-glass windows was radiant and I addressed myself heavenward and spoke the following words. "God, I no longer believe in you." Only later would I realize that such a worded rejection betrayed a fundamental belief in Him.

A short time afterwards my parents no longer required my two siblings and I to accompany them to Sunday Mass. They believed we'd reached an age to make such decisions for our selves. I was then severed as I wished from any religious doctrine. I stayed out of church save for the occasional Christmas season midnight mass. I would on those holiday visits enjoy the ritual and pageantry of the service, but I would in the end walk away without any spiritual nourishment. Church remained merely a task master before which I cared not bow.

When I was sixteen my grandmother, Nana, died and I attended my first funeral service. On that day bells were rung invoking God, and great plumes of incense smoke rose ever upwards as the priest intoned the reasons that made my grandmother a good Catholic. If there was comfort in what he spoke I did not feel it for his words lacked the resonance of poetry. And there was in his speech the steady drone of delivery by rote. The dead before him could have been anyone. At the end of the service I walked away feeling bereft with loss and further estranged from the would be comfort of religion.

Two years later my grandfather remarried. In the midst of the ceremony the officiating priest invoked the name and memory of the dearly departed Nana. He rattled on and on about her until a chill swept through the gathered draining all of good cheer. His words could not have been more inappropriate. I thought the priest a jerk. During the reception afterwards he approached my brother and father and I as we were getting some fresh air on the back porch of the wedding couple's home. He asked my father if either of his sons was a candidate for the priesthood. "I don't think so, Father," said my father with a chuckle. "I can't even get them to go to church with me." You would have thought my father had slapped him. For the priest exploded. Sputtering and fuming he denounced my father for failing his children. Then he turned his wrath on my brother and I. He vehemently swore we were both going to rot and suffer in Hell for all of eternity. Had he been an actor I would have said you're way over doing it. But he was not an actor. He was a man of God. And he would serve for the next two decades as a livid example of why religion was not for me.

I was in those ensuing years unmoored from God although I admit I did during that time petition the almighty for this and that. After all there are no atheist in the foxhole as the saying goes, and I was at the time at war internally with psychological strife and spiritual malaise.

Then I was introduced to the Twelve Steps and its concept of salvation and spiritual recovery through a belief in a God of my own understanding. Here was comfort outside the bounds of religion. I had only to believe in a power greater than my self. And I was free to pick and choose the attributes of this self defined higher power. The notion at first struck me as farce. If this was not God made in my own image than what was? But over time some fledgling belief took hold. For instance I came to see that I was blessed many times over with fortuitous coincidences. This led me to believe there was a benevolent power at work in my life. I was made humble and reverent too before the majesty of all living things, and saw within mother nature a power most divine. And I was comforted and struck with awe at just how precious life was. In that way I ventured forth with a concept of God that was as simple and complex as all encompassing love.

These days I begin my mornings down on my knees asking God to help me do His will, which I believe is to be loving and kind. I also end my nights on my knees thanking God for at least three things that occurred during that day. In the hours between my supplications I do my best to live each day as if there were a higher purpose, a gift if you will, to share with one another unconditional love.

And a final thought. "A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues." So said Marcus Tullius Cicero over a millennium ago.