Emily DuBose, Senior, English, Austin, Texas
I guess it’s just habit. We haven’t even been to church in years. Maybe prayer is the sole leftover of decades of monotonous, perfunctory religious practice. Even my mom’s voice as she says the prayer is automatic, dispassionate. She recites the exact same prayer every day. She has it memorized, her tired voice speeding through the words until they have no meaning. The prayer is quick – less than ten seconds long. We are all eager to get it over with so we can get to the actual reason that at least three members of the family are gathered around the table: food. The prayer has been reduced to an obstacle hindering our greedy path to dinner.
But really, I know that my mom uses the nightly prayer as a way to claim that we’re still a “good Christian family.” As if saying the prayer at dinner will save our damned souls. Even though dinner time is the only time we even talk about God or religion. It would have to be a God-given miracle or the end of the goddamned world if we prayed at any other time of day of our own accord.
Prayer at this point also just feels insubstantial. Dissonant. It really doesn’t feel potent when children are being shot in schools every week and the US government seems more adamant about protecting gun rights instead of children’s lives. Or women’s lives. Or the lives of people of color. Our nightly dinner prayer is just as ineffective as the thoughts and prayers that people on Facebook send to schools that have just been shot up. Those prayers are trying to block a tsunami of shit with one umbrella. So yeah, prayer feels a little inconsistent with reality.
And that’s only if they’re even trying. Now, most of the time, prayers aren’t actually said with intentionality – people say them publicly to save face or when they can’t think of anything else to say. Prayers are just falsities posing as faith. Jesus is not with us, only a Walmart-purchased cardboard cutout of a white man with greasy hair.
But I guess we just cling on to what makes us feel comfortable. We’ll keep monotonously repeating the same damn prayer every night even if it doesn’t actually help. Just so we can say we did it.