Hands to heaven

On top of everything else, and now, I suppose, because of it, is this recent struggle with faith. What are my thoughts on the Big Guy Upstairs?

My standard explanation, when asked, was always that I was perfectly comfortable walking through life with my second-grade Sunday-school beliefs untested and intact.

I'm not sure when that changed, but it has, and now I don't know what to do with the shards. Do I attempt to piece them back together, or just dust them off into the garbage bin?

More than anything, it's the prayer thing that gets me.

Come on, now: am I really just talking to myself? Is it some form of self-therapy that may, on occasion, meet with blind serendipity or dumb luck? When prayers are answered, allegedly, is it the power of suggestion, positive thinking, self-fulfilling prophecy?

When my father's father died, we weren't aware that, in his retirement, he'd actually had a full-time job: protecting his wife's fragility from the world, and vice versa. In his absence, we realized the enormity of the task. What's worse, so did she.

I was fourteen, and I remember every detail of the room and the moment when she stood at the top of the stairs and stammered, in this impossibly small and helpless voice, "But... but I don't even know how to pray."

At the time, and for the longest time thereafter, I thought it was the saddest thing I'd ever heard. Just the saddest statement anyone could make. Not knowing how to pray? How could anyone feel that lost and alone?

I think I get it now, and I don't like it.

How do I pray? And for what? I need to know. I really, really need to know.