I live at McLean Village, a retirement community in Simsbury, Connecticut, full of saints and sinners like me—all of us very practiced in our saintly and sinful habits. Few would admit to such “lofty” terms, but there is truth in both for most.
One day I was taking a walk around the property and I spotted this lovely old piece of church furniture—prayer equipment. It’s called a prie-dieu (French for pray God). This is a good phrase to describe the activity for which this furniture is intended. There is a small desk on which a book perches in case you are leading prayers, or in case you forget the words in sudden precatory stage fright, or in case your prayer simply falls into silence. That happens when you realize that you are on your knees suddenly praying not for God, or to God, but in God.
On this sunny day I was wide awake when I spotted this prie-dieu standing all alone and ready. For what I didn’t know, since the chapel was solidly locked, its renovations in process and delayed. The prie-dieu looked lonely so I went to it and knelt down. I asked God to help us accomplish the obvious: open this chapel space so we can have a sacred place on campus dedicated to your Presence, begging for our own presence, and mourning, not the absence of presence but its waning.
I felt like an orphan begging entrance, or a child at play with a fascinating foreign object newly discovered, or an old priest, filled with needful, wistful loneliness, untethered from traditional worship, church artifacts, and song.
It had been raining and the kneeler cushion was soaked. So were my knees when I finally arose and resumed my walk. So were my cheeks from all the longing I felt in the midst of the necessary isolation in a pandemic. Activity is minimal and minimized. Prayer, personal and corporate, is the only vital way back to Life. Prayer is the bread of Life. So I pray. I’m nourished.
Grateful to be vaccinated and well and pained to be alone.
Grateful for the voice, laughs, and hugs of a very much alive husband.
Pained to imagine death, loss—absence—of all flesh with its pleasures
and its pains, its temptations and its astounding capacity to embody heaven and hell, saint and sinner, at once.
