A Prayer You Can Hold in Your Hand

On milagros, suffering, and the concretization of the ephemeral

*Hi, hello, and welcome if you are new! I’m so glad you’re here.*

While most of the country has been back in school for a while, here in Seattle we’re only just leaving summer in the rearview. School started last week, and as we’ve been getting back into our fall rhythm, I’ve been thinking about summer’s highlights. Since I’m me, one of them is a contemplative tunnel I fell down in August. My favorite kind of tunnel.

In the summer I do a lot of driving, as the primary summer camp ferry deputy. If my kids are excited about it, and it’s remotely within the budget, I will drive them to the moon and back in hope that they’ll have a good time. Mostly I listen to podcasts on my long journeys back home to my waiting computer and precariously stacked books, but sometimes my birth date of the late 1900s catches up to me, and I just flip through the radio stations until I land on a good song. Preferably a Led Zeppelin song.

But sometimes I end up entranced by something else. When we moved to Seattle almost eight years ago, I was surprised by the number of Christian radio stations; there are at least five of them. This isn’t a particularly churchy part of the country—no Mary statues or devotional books at the thrift stores in these parts.

I’m from Memphis, where we know from Christian radio, which I dutifully blared in my fundamentalist evangelical days. I can’t really say it’s anything but jarring to me now, the relentless upbeat voices, the music which others more expert than I am have pointed out is always, but always, in the major key. No room there for any emotion south of jubilant.

As I was flipping through the stations one hot afternoon, I was down in the low call numbers, far from the three Christian stations near the top of the range. If those three are aggressively modern, this station is just as stubbornly old-fashioned. In the evenings they play radio dramas about minor moral infractions like stealing fruit from a neighbor’s tree, and in the mornings choir music that sounds like it was recorded fifty years ago and is perhaps being played on its original scratchy vinyl. But on this afternoon I heard something else.

Instrumental music was playing, heavy on the warbling organ tones, music so out of fashion it would be best suited to a 1950s filmstrip on the glories of the newfangled dishwasher. But every twenty seconds or so, a stolid male vice would read prayer requests, presumably submitted by listeners. One at a time, each entreaty was given its own little pause, during which you could join in asking for the request to be granted.

It felt like attending church at least half a century before. But…I listened. In spite of the hokey music and dated cadences of speech, these were real people. With real pain. People with wayward children. People desperately seeking a job or a car. People waiting anxiously for very consequential test results. People with all kinds of physical ailments. People wildly hoping that today would be the day that brought good news.

For all the alienation I felt—the music, the antiquated speech, the style of prayer that is far from my go-to—there was something universal here. Something that made me, a person far removed from the time and space when this was recorded, belong. As Dorothy Day always said, there is no time with God. And although someone once misunderstood her to mean she had no time for God and sent her a weighty theological tome in hopes of reforming her, what she meant was that God exists outside of time. Prayer stretches backwards and forwards. It’s never limited by our particular spot on the timeline of human history.

Listening to those radio requests this summer reminded me of another type of prayer, also deeply personal, deeply supplicatory.

The first time I encountered a milagro, I was in Santa Fe, tagging along with Eric on a work trip. I spent my days eating posole with green chile and visiting as many chapels as I could squeeze into a day. In one of them, I noticed tiny metal pieces nailed right into the wooden beams flanking the pews.

They were prayers. Prayers made tangible, prayers turned concrete. Prayers for children, for legs and arms and eyes, for ears and breasts and lungs, for animals and pregnancy and rest. It took my breath away, being in the presence of so many people’s deepest desires and wishes. Milagro is Spanish for miracle. And that’s what people were asking for. Just like the callers to the radio show.

I had my own request for a miracle on that trip. We hoped that we were pregnant, but it wasn’t yet time to test. Everywhere I went that week, I touched the milagros of pregnant bellies, lit candles for our hoped-for baby.

I dropped my request into this little triangular box and entrusted it to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Someone collected it, I’m sure, and prayed for my intention the same way the radio host did for those dozens and dozens of others.

A few days later, giddy in our hotel room, we found out that our little miracle was on the way. Today he is a cheerful fifth-grader who can tell you the specs of any and every cargo plane ever built. He has his thirteen-digit library card number memorized and loves Japanese peanuts. He is the word of our prayers made flesh.

I brought some milagros home with me from Santa Fe. I gave one of a tooth to my closest friend, whose kids were facing some intensive and scary dental procedures. She mailed one of eyes to me when I was facing cataract surgery. I sent one of a leg to a friend who is recovering from bone surgery in her knees. Sometimes you just need a way to concretize the ephemeral. A way to nail your suffering into wood hewn centuries before you were born. A way to pass your prayers into the hands of another person.

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering this week because I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Holy wow. It is so deserving of the Pulitzer and any and every other award anyone should throw its way. I have not encountered a narrative voice like that in years. It is easily one of the best novels I have ever read, a novel you can’t wait to read again before you’ve even finished it. Inspired by David Copperfield, it is deeply Dickensian, but also deeply Dostoevskian (no surprise there—Dostoevsky loved Dickens), taking us unfathomably deep into a suffering Appalachia, intentionally thrust by the unconscionable greed of Purdue Pharma into the devastation of the opioid crisis.

Maybe you’ll remember from this post that I actually bought this novel way back in February, and it’s a little bit embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to get to it, but in my defense, it got quickly buried under a stack of library books. I was reminded of it by this post from my friend Liz, and then this one from my friend Renee. (I confess, the line “Barbara Kingsolver really finished reading Hillbilly Elegy years ago and said to JD Vance: hold my beer” really hooked me.) Liz’s point is also a really cogent one—sometimes fiction tells a truer story. I’ve read a ton of books about the opioid crisis, and they are magnificent. But we need fiction too.

I don’t know if Barbara Kingsolver would think of it this way, but to me, Demon Copperhead is a prayer, a call into an old-fashioned radio station, a milagro, a nailing of pain into wood, a pressing of one people’s suffering into the hands of others. I hope we can reach out with empty palms to receive it.

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A Few Hopeful Things

—My bestie’s new book is out!! The Mystics Would Like a Word is everything you could hope for in terms of honest writing, deep research, and an empowering reclamation of the Christian female mystic tradition. Go get your copy!

—If you are, in fact, looking for a good song in the minor key, you cannot go wrong with this stunning Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant duet. Brings me to tears every time.

—Last Sunday after mass, our younger miracle ran down the steps after donut time, and I assumed he was off to engage in his favorite activity, terrifying his mother by darting through the busy parking lot. But I found him like this. The kids are alright.

Nailing milagros into wood with you,
Cameron