The Reader's Digest Prayer

*

- When you pray, do not just pray the Reader's Digest prayer (the anchoress said).

- What do you mean? What kind of prayer is that?

- Well, there is a magazine, or there was a magazine that made its reputation on rescue stories and "life endangered" stories. A girl rescued from a stalker, a town saved from a forest fire, a little boy who gets his donated kidney just in time.

- What's wrong with that? Is there something wrong with being rescued?

- Well there was a question that the magazine never asked. Once the rescue has happened, what kind of life does the rescued person live? Is it that they shopped at Walmart, then had their danger, then were rescured, and then went back shopping at Walmart every day? As though nothing had really happened?? Was that the rescue? Was that the good life they were born to live?

- I'll bite. *Was* it?

- But that's not the question I'm asking, not exactly. (Since I don't even know the person who was rescued.) I'm not asking whether their ordinary life, outside the emergency, was a good life. I'm asking, how do we decide? How can we know? And why doesn't the writer of this article help us answer this? Why this focus on protecting the normal day to day secularity and never looking beyond.

- And when it comes to prayer....

- Do not settle for the Reader's Digest prayer. That was what I was saying. Do not be so sure you know what to pray for. When a person living an empty life suffers a fire in her house, pray for her to survive the fire, pray for her house to survive. But don't stop without also praying for that life that was rescued also to be rescued, if need be -- rescued a second time, a deeper time. Even if that second rescue comes in the form of fire.

*