pray(er

 

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Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed. 

He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. 

Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction—those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart. 

Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.  

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.


—Louise Erdrich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

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We have weaved our past into the present, a rhythmic pattern of long cotton strings pressing in and pulling out across the loom. It thunders through our existence like wild horses run across the desert. No matter how far we go, what kind of car we drive, how much money we make, how many degrees we pile up behind our name, we are still here. 

We are here, a tiny piece of woven stories, like pixels in a photo or molecules of mist in a rainbow. We are here, together on the same earth. It is important to notice one another smile, hug, dance, and sing together while our piece of thread is being woven into a bigger picture of a peaceful future.


—Tu Bears

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