Praying to Sue

I wrote an essay a few weeks ago about praying to a God I don’t believe in. The ritual of prayer is an old one, taught to me since my infancy. I tried so hard to hold onto it as I lost faith, tried to hold to it as a way of calling my community to join together in good works and in love. I mostly failed in this. Actually, I completely failed. I failed very, very badly in my attempt to move my religious community anywhere near where I had moved. I failed even in trying to argue that there were other ways to think about God and to worship. I failed, too, at convincing my community that I deserved to remain a part of it.

And when my life went to shit, I found myself bobbing up in the ocean of uncertainty, reaching for anything that might help me, thrashing about as I went back down again and again. I prayed to a Mother God. I prayed to a child-God. I prayed to a nature-God. I prayed to an amorphous, genderless God. I tried connecting to a Buddhist God. I tried to let go of attachment. I tried to believe that I was divine in some way that mattered.

Now when I pray to the God I don’t believe in, it is often short. I pray for things I want, sometimes for myself, more often for my children or other loved ones. I send out my wishes to the universe, not really believing that anyone is listening or that anyone has power to help (except perhaps me). It isn’t the same as prayer before. But it isn’t terrible, either. It is—like chanting the first few lines of Goethe’s Faust, memorized in grad school, or the words of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English. It is a link with the past, even if it is all nonsense now.

But since my friend Sue died at the end of the summer, I have tried a new variant on this. I pray to Sue. I don’t think I really believe that Sue is listening to me. I certainly don’t believe she has power to give me what I ask for. But mostly what happens when I pray to Sue is that I remember her laughter. I can see her throwing her head back at what was our nearly last lunch together, after she was sick and knew she was dying, while she spent a lot of time and energy trying to save me from despair. She laughed. She loved life. And also she sometimes hated life. I remember her weeping, too. Sometimes it was in the same conversation. She was just so full of feeling. I loved that about her.

I want her back in a way. I know that I can’t really have that, except in my imagination. And so I pray and bring her back to life in the only way I know how. She laughs at me when I ask for things that I shouldn’t ask for, when I pray for things that she would say are me wanting to take away someone else’s agency. She tells me that God isn’t like that, the God I hate and can’t pray to, and that God is really more like her kind of argumentative, loving style of combat. It’s not that I think God is like Sue. It’s that I wish that I believed in the God she believed in, because she was really like that God. And I loved her so much. I want her to be God, if I have to believe in a God.