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Shameless Prayer

What precipitated my pleas? In March I collapsed. An ambulance whisked me to the emergency ward. I had tried a new bipolar medicine (the old one was thinning my hair: vanity, vanity) but the new stuff went toxic on me. In the hours it took to pee out the toxicity I could neither walk nor talk.  
     I now suspect my friends miss my enforced silence.
     “Kiley, pray to your ancestors to intercede for me,” I said. Long ago she rejected Mother Church due to its “misogyny and homophobia.” But pray she did. If Catholicism has given us nothing else it is belief in the after life. Meanwhile, word spread across the land. Kiley’s mom, Peggy, offered up a Mass for me in far away Jay, Vermont.
    To dad I said, “Pray for me, to your parents especially.” His folks were Pentecostals. They prayed over the sick. Inexplicable cures at times ensued. If my diagnosis is ever dire, I will call a Pentecostal first.
      I didn’t need to ask mom to pray. Daily she rises for long stretches of prayer, devotional reading and coffee. But I have a feeling mom is like me. We slip into worry for family, friends and Iraq, we advise God on what to do—and mistake that for prayer. But this is a woman who once planned to join a contemplative order of nuns. She’s no novice. Somehow she reins in the worries and stays the course.
      The NCR staff was not spared an emailed account of my plight. “Everyone pray for me—Patty especially—as her saint’s feast day is around the bend I believe.” The prayer of one named for a saint is mighty, I remind Catholics tempted to name a newborn, Destiny.
     Some people have more than their fair share of guardian angels. Carla, a Protestant for what it’s worth, should be dead by now (she died once on an operating table, ascending toward the light, enjoying the orgy of cursing surgeons certain they’d lost her for good.) “You can spare an angel, Carlita. Come on, time for the changing of the guard,” I pouted.
      I’ve many atheist friends, activists all, who will march past the pearly gates before me thanks to their sleepless nights and days devoted to ending injustice. In their younger years they read Karl Marx, who believed that religion is the opium of the people.
      I called Mimi. “If I don’t sleep tonight I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. You’re assignment is to pray to Marx. Ask him to smoke a little opium for me just this once.”
      Now let me come clean: I don’t believe for a moment that prayer works. God does, or all those living at that other frequency we call heaven, beings moving at the speed of light, nudging us toward wholeness, even if in death.
        Chicana to the bone, I hereby make a promesa. When I get well (I’m back on the old med) I will do more for those sickened by lack of clean water, food, and health care.  
      That said, one last shameless appeal: Throw in an extra ‘Hail Mary’ for me dear reader. And I’ll tell St. Anthony, my patron, to lighten your load: lost keys, lost documents, lost health, lost hope, he’ll come through.