In defense of unanswered prayers

Sometimes behind and between unrequited longing lives another possibility.

Hello friends! My “In Defense of” entry is a bit different this month. Instead of regurgitating the soul fat I’ve been chewing on for the last decade, I thought it most fitting to share a chapter from my memoir Unfixed where my desperation reached such magnitude that I went on a deity shopping spree to see who might listen and save me from the unending terror of my body unmoored. My prayer for a cure didn’t happen, but the saving did, as a heightened and unconditional awareness for a “peace that passeth understanding” took its place. Sometimes behind and between unrequited longing lives another possibility, a surprising kind of healing that transcends our ego’s wishes; but in my experience, only through surrender can the unanswered prayer yield the most fulfilling answer of all.

You don’t need to have read the full memoir for context, but if your appetite is whet upon finishing, I recommend beginning HERE with the Preface.

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With each passing month, I feel less and less Joseph Campbell’s hero and more a failed mortal drowning in the River Styx, trapped soulless between life and afterlife. But cathartic shifts with mom are a healing balm so magical thinking interjects with dire conviction: Mom’s apology was the missing piece. Now the journey is complete and the dizziness will surely go away.

But time has other plans.

Cycles of hope and disappointment mock my unflagging pursuit of a cure. Mom tirelessly keeps believing. Dave and I limp along with the distance and his helplessness furthers the strain. We nearly break-up multiple times, giving up on each other, giving up on ourselves. In Boulder, Colorado—the capital of toxic positivity—I am drowning in a sea of optimism. Everyone has an answer, a cure or knows someone who was cured. But why not me? I am the unchosen one. The harder I chase, the worse it gets. I crave stillness so badly—now seven months, 24/7, of maddening motion—my body is no longer mine. I’m worn to my very core.

I want to give up.

I start praying. Hard. With no real religious compass, I’m not sure to whom, but I fall to my knees anyway and go on a deity shopping spree.

A psychic says my “spiritual body has a miasma” and it will take five months to dissipate. I count the days dutifully. I go to her psychic cleansing sessions. I repeat her mantras. An acupuncturist gives me a copper Quan Yin plate to put under my pillow. I pray to her before bed and then curse her in the middle of night after sleepless night. I practice Qi Gong. I meditate. I read Mooji, Adyashanti, Krishnamurti, anyone whose name ends in “i.” I reread Pema Chodrin’s When Things Fall Apart. I create a Mother Mary shrine on my bed stand.

The following February I return home to Portland to attend a defense attorney’s scheduled mediation, the entrails of the 2014 bike incident still dragging behind me. Insurance wanted to settle right after the accident but I was advised to wait until all medical treatment had been completed. Now, two years post accident, I’m still in the thick of it. The optometrist says it’s my eyes. The ENT says it’s my ears. The physical therapist says it’s my pelvis. The neurologist says it’s my neck. The psychiatrist says it’s trauma. The psychic says it’s my dirty soul. So the settlement drags on. Returning to an eight-hour deposition is no warm homecoming. But in hindsight, though as dizzy as the day I left, I’m glad law intervenes and flies what’s left of me back to Dave.

I ache for the loss of our life. One wobbly foot in the front of the other, I try to stay focused on moments of gratitude— our stubborn love despite the heartache, the birds singing at sunrise, the sweet potato on my plate. If I zoom out, I fall into a hole of self-pity. I am forty-one going on eighty. The invisibility of symptoms and lack of diagnosis compound the ache. Friends and coworkers eventually stop asking questions and I stop talking about it. There’s nothing to say except I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know.

But at the end of each day, someone lays by my side. And even though my sleep is more fitful than his, my psyche leans in and listens. She’s strangely comforted, even relieved, by his way. Dave isn’t trying to fix me. He’s just being with me. His energy is heavy, sure, and undoubtedly marred by unprocessed trauma, but fathering a daughter with intellectual disability for twenty-one years has taught him to be in relationship to what is, and not what might be. Being next to him, I inch slowly—ever so slowly—closer to myself, as I am.

One afternoon Dave returns home with an old, thrift store painting of a ship at sea. The sails are full and taut as the dark tempest threatens to swallow the ship whole. As I study the acrylic likeness of my experience, my beloved atheist—still drawing from decades of Fundamentalist Baptist indoctrination—offers a parable about Christ at sea during a large squall. While disciples are physically sick from the swells and gripped with fear for their lives, Christ lies on the bow of the ship and sleeps.

HE LIES ON THE BOW OF THE SHIP AND SLEEPS.

This image becomes my anchor. Daily, hourly, I close my eyes, paint myself onto the bow, imagine feeling so safe, so trusting, that I can finally let go and rest. I stop wishing for a cure and start envisioning peace in the storm. And most days, I’m baffled—surrendering completely to my symptoms and allowing them to run their course feels implausible. It’s like trying to undo millions of years of biological hardwiring: when a threat is perceived, fight it, fix it, flee from it. I find little relief, but unlike everything else I’ve tried, this practice puts me in relationship to myself, exactly as I am, not some distant possible me once I’m cured.

I am told Grandmother Isabelle, Charlie’s mom, died reading one of her favorite passages, Psalm 38:21–22. One minute she was upright at the breakfast table with the Bible open in her hands, the next, she was gone. The passage closes with a prayer: Lord, give us the peace that passeth all understanding, and the understanding that gives us peace.

I want to learn, I need to learn, to live with an unconditional peace despite the circumstances of my body, my life. If repose and happiness are tethered to an endless continuum of pain, relief, disappointment, and hope, I’m signing up for misery. And though it feels irrational if not impossible to feel tranquil during a shit storm, and never experiencing stillness again unfathomable, I carry Dave’s painting and Grandma Isabelle’s passage within me until the incomprehensible becomes imaginable, and the possibility that frightens me most becomes my very doorway into peace.

Riding on a cross-water vessel
	four hours not enough
looping threads from an aquatic now
through hopeful 
memories of a steadier past
into sleep
and submission
	sewn for a synthesis of me
I join the under-hull lapping
while rocking to a fro
in my lasting barreling fog
sanity reasons
	nothing can be done to stop this all
so like a father’s blue-smoke ride
	(and his foreshadowed blue-watered one)
I am helpless
then allowing
then at peace
	like they say about healing


Now Yes returns
to join that dual dimension
where all things resisted reside
	Pain
	vulnerability 
	angst fill one breath
		(the inhale)
	while an exhale the size of infinity 
	holds hibernal emptiness
			silence
			surrender
The inhale always expects an answer
though often
of necessity 
more demanding than giving
The exhale replies
for the lifetimes of resistance
and delivers grace unto both