Episode Details

My grandmother's final gift to me was a rosary of fifty-nine blue stone beads around a silver-cast cross. It arrived in the mail one afternoon with a card that read Dear Shawn, Pray. Love, Gram like a wire sent from her hospice bed in Pennsylvania to my kitchen in New Mexico. What was the lesson my grandmother, at age 98, wanted to dispatch as she packed her bags for another world? With a grocery bag tucked under one arm and a baby on my hip, I read and reread the card, trying to decode her tremulous cursive and the white space around the words, their unspoken context.

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother seemed preternaturally endowed with reserve and fortitude. She graduated from college, became a dietician, served in the military, and raised six children after the love of her life, the grandfather I never met, died in their forties. 

My grandmother wore rubber-heeled red sandals with cherry lipstick. She drove a van with handicap rigging for my aunt, who had cerebral palsy. We spent many childhood summers living under her roof at the lake. She would hand us exactly one dollar each for candy at the bodega on good days. With the point of an index finger, she instructed us to wash your hands, make your bed, unload the groceries, say your please & thank you’s. What my grandmother commanded, we obeyed — and on Fridays, she cooked bolognese. 

Sundays were for church-going. Mary Oliver humbly wrote, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” I didn’t know how to pray or pay attention, but prayer was the thread my grandmother followed through life’s uncertainties, so to church we went. 

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible…. To appear good, I joined the murmur of the congregation as the priest in his white and gold vestments lifted a chalice above his head. I remember how the almost sweet scent of incense hung in the air, the hard feel of the wooden pew beneath me, the sound of men clearing their throats, and women singing in airy voices while flipping through thin pages in the book of hymns. I remember how mid-morning light would enter through the stained glass windows above us and calmly spread its wings. 

Since those days, I have learned to pray in four languages. I've made ritual movements with my whole body, sat still in sustained silence, sought refuge in poems, touched flowers, poured water, circled up, made altars, and joined in song. I've sweat through prayers on airplanes and in hospital waiting rooms and held vigil with gripped hands through long nights, repeating the most muscular prayer of all: please. 

I once watched an old woman for an entire day at Boudhanath in Kathmandu. She had worn deep grooves in the wooden board beneath her by anchoring her feet and sliding on her hands and knees, touching her forehead to the ground, murmuring om mani pädme hum, back and forth, forward and back, through countless repetitions.

And though certain prayers have become friends, the specific form is less interesting to me now than the quality of concentration into which any prayer can invite our attention. “Attention” says the French philosopher Simone Weil, “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Prayer doesn’t require formal structure; it doesn’t even require words. It just asks for presence.

Thich Nhat Hanh once responded to a question about the practice of prayer:

This is the basic condition for the effectiveness of prayer. The one who prays should be truly there, established in the here and now, having a very clear intention, a very clear desire as to whom he or she will pray, and for whom he or she will pray. If the one who prays can put himself or herself in that situation, much has already been done. That person already