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Forthcoming by Sara Anderson
This section contains the "chapter-by-chapter outline" of the
book proposal for Petitioning God. There are abstracts of each
chapter, so it tells the whole story in condensed form. Feel free to
write me with any questions or comments, at
sara@petitioninggod.com. (I know it runs over the border of the
window; sorry about that but I hope it doesn't bother you.)
book proposal for Petitioning God. There are abstracts of each
chapter, so it tells the whole story in condensed form. Feel free to
write me with any questions or comments, at
sara@petitioninggod.com. (I know it runs over the border of the
window; sorry about that but I hope it doesn't bother you.)
About this page:
Petitioning God: How I Learned to Get Prayers Answered—
and Find Light & Joy
Chapter One: Introduction
[NOTE: This chapter is now online in its entirety at the
"Chapter 1" button. I recommend that instead of this
abstract, but suit yourself.]
I was going on fifteen when the Creator of the universe
first that I was attending for purely social reasons. (I had
known I was gay for about a year, but—happily—the process
of chasing girls wasn’t really any different from what most of
my friends were doing to chase boys.) After a half hour or so
of chips and dip, Hawaiian Punch, and strategic mingling in
hopes of impressing these objects of newfound romantic
yearning, we awkward and giggly adolescents settled in the
living room of our classmate’s home, and the Presbyterian
minister began a simple talk about the parable of the sower. A
few minutes into it, I suddenly became aware that a huge
presence, way too big and powerful to be a figment of my
imagination, was lifting me up and showing me, in a blinding
flash of light and truth, that everything on Earth was contained
within a sort of giant aquarium that was itself couched within a
larger milieu of love and benevolence. Suspended, momentarily,
above the sofas and chairs and tables and paintings, I knew that
everything was going to be OK and that all earthly events were
relatively that I was attending for purely social reasons. (I had
known I unimportant in themselves because of this position the
planet occupied as a world within a larger world. A minute or
two later, when I tuned back in to the minister’s talk, he was
on the last category of the sower’s seed, that which fell on the
good soil and yielded a hundredfold crop, and I thought my
brain was going to explode with joy.
Over the subsequent decades, while the memory of my
vision has been a source of tremendous comfort, my personal
dialogue with the obtruding being has undergone constant
evolution that continues to this day. At some point after the
Bible-study zapping, it occurred to me that it surely would be
nice if I could get petitionary prayer to work—“ask, and it shall
be given unto you”—so I started trying different techniques of
getting the being to grant my requests. My earliest efforts were
concentrated on compensating for my hearing impairment; the
70% loss meant I was continually subject to such incidents as
being called on in class when I had no idea what was being
asked, so I tried entreating God with a kind of willed belief
(almost like a blind faith) to prevent those occurrences, and
they largely ceased. Gradually over the years, the scope of my
prayer subjects increased, as did the sophistication of my
petitioning technique. By my early forties, I was making some
rather remarkable progress in areas like relationships and money
management as well as my endeavors to teach school despite
my disability, but this success was achieved only through
repeated psychic struggles. Aware that most books on praying
tended to gloss over the nitty-gritty of what actually took place
in the gray matter of the person trying to pray, I began keeping
a psychologically detailed spiritual journal. That journal is the
raw material of Petitioning God.
In this chapter, I’ll explain my chief discovery: that
fruitful petitioning is invariably tied to lessons we need to learn
or changes we need to make in ourselves if we want God to
answer our prayers. In order to identify these lessons and make
a start toward putting them into action, we have to get to know
ourselves and God—not an easy task in our rapid-paced, social-
and-entertainment-oriented culture. But if we do make up our
minds to carve out a space amid the haste, we become double
winners: the personal transformations we have to undergo in
order for our prayers to be answered typically bring us even
more peace and joy than do the granted petitions they give rise
to.
Although my own belief in the Creator has withstood
every challenge I have mounted against it since that Bible study
in 1971, no deeply held faith is required to put the petitioning
program into practice. Since the time of St. Augustine, the
activity of praying to a God that one isn’t sure exists has been
an accepted theological position. Accordingly, readers can try
developing a relationship with God as though he exists, just to
see what happens. The insights they will gain into themselves
and the universe will lead to a greater psychological maturity
regardless of the status of their belief.
Furthermore, while it seems obvious from the context in
which I was zapped that Christianity is one way to understand
the supernatural being and our relationship to him, I have never
seen any reason to confine my ideas about God and spiritual
progress to the Christian point of view, especially not those
stricter constructions of Christianity that are so visible in the
world today. I think other religions (such as Buddhism and
Judaism, including the Kabbalah) and other fields of knowledge
(such as psychology), can also shed light on the mystery of
how we can best communicate with our Maker.
The idea of making requests of the deity pervades our
culture, but largely in the capacity of a comfortable myth. Even
secular humanists, who carefully avoid naming a supernatural
being, commonly say things like “Let’s have a good thought for
her,” while nearly all religions recognize petitionary prayer as
one of the chief ways humans can relate to the divine. Hardly
anyone is the least bit surprised, however, when prayers don’t
work, because they don’t expect them to, not consistently
anyway. Petitioning God is the story of what can happen when
we do expect prayers to work.
Chapter Two: Three Decades of Begging the Guy Upstairs
for Help
[This chapter is also online in its entirety, at the Chapter
Two/Sample Chapter button; if you like, you can read that,
then return to this outline & pick up with the Chapter
Three abstract.]
Chapter Two will trace the development over the years of
my petitioning ability. I will introduce the reader to the spiritual
lessons I learned, such as:
•Ask and believe. I sent up prayers each morning my senior
year of high school, asking for help in hearing my teachers. My
only technique was simple willed belief. It worked, too, to an
amazing extent.
•Cultivate faith in the face of doubt. This time, my goal was to
secure a graduate teaching assistantship in my master’s
program at Mississippi College even though all the positions had
been awarded several months earlier. In desperation as time
seemed to be running out, I bolstered my faltering faith using
the “Act as If” aphorism from the twelve-step programs and
the practice of visualization from sports psychology. Refusing
to give negative thoughts any wiggle room, I repeatedly
imagined myself in the desired TA position, with classes to
teach, papers to grade, and students to come to my office for
help. I even visited the campus bookstore to examine the texts I
would be using in my course. And at the very last minute, the
department head called and asked if I was still interested in
being a TA.
•Forgiveness is elemental. During my doctoral program at
Louisiana State University, where I was again a TA, I needed
God’s help as I tried to develop ways to compensate for my
hearing loss in the classroom. When I talked this one over with
God, I realized that I was blocking him from helping me by
feeling annoyed at certain insistently vocal students for asking
so many questions in class. At first, the idea of losing my
annoyance— that is, of forgiving them—seemed impossible; I
had always been quite the misanthrope, secretly disdainful of
scores of people for no good reason. But when I discovered
that forgiving others in order to get your own prayers answered
was a requirement stated by no less than Jesus himself, I was
so excited to have such a clear and definite instruction that I
made up my mind to do whatever it took. Repeatedly humbling
myself and begging God to rip my annoyance and disdain out of
me, I finally succeeded in losing my contemptuous feelings,
which set the stage for him to grant my requests for help in the
classroom.
•Take a hint from life—or else! I was offered a chance at a
dream job in my hometown but, during the Interview from Hell,
I blew it magnificently as a direct result of my immaturity and
egotism. Like a spoiled brat, I felt that I wasn’t ready for a full-
time job yet, and I was mad that they had even called me about
it, because I knew I had to agree to the interview since it would
be crazy not to. So I agreed to it but with a bad attitude,
neglecting to arrange for some kind if interpreter in case I
needed one, and then when I got in there I couldn’t understand
a frigging word the department head was saying. In my
desperation I tried to simply guess at what she might be asking
me and answer accordingly, making a total fool of myself and
ruining my teaching prospects at that school forever.
Afterwards, in the serious self-examination that I was forced
into, I admitted that I sorely needed to change my outlook.
•Relax and let God do his thing. Later on in my TA career at
LSU, each day before class I would go through the motions of
combing my hair in front of the mirror in the ladies’ room, just
so I could stand there without calling attention to myself while I
silently entreated God to make the upcoming session productive
and to help me through whatever communication challenges lay
ahead. Pondering my humble position in the universe, I would
make a conscious effort to put my trust in the Creator—and
sometimes when I did that I could actually sense God’s
presence there in the ladies’ room behind me, as though the
sturdy metal fixtures and the thick concrete walls were a direct
manifestation of his strength and reliability. I found I could tap
into that strength by relaxing physically, breathing deeply and
then letting my shoulders fall downward as I exhaled, as if to
relieve their burden of trying to be in charge of everything when
actually God had so much more control over the entire situation
than I did. It worked so well that my end-of-semester student
evaluations were the highest yet.
Chapter Two will also examine the beginnings of my
relationship with my student Belinda, whom God put into my
path by having me teach her in Freshman Comp during my last
semester as a TA (spring 1996). Being instructor to this
intelligent, fresh-faced, pre-Raphaelite beauty, who was quite
simply the first comfortably gay woman I had ever been
interested in, was a petitioning challenge in itself, which I will
convey in detail in the chapter. From the very first session, she
would sit in the second row, her long auburn tresses
incongruously atop heavy metal T-shirts and faded jeans, and
listen wide-eyed to every word I uttered—and then submit
deeply principled yet witty essays on a broad variety of
subjects. My teacher’s comments in the margins were my
portion of the pas de deux. As soon as the final exam was over,
it was only a few hours before we were at my apartment, shyly
holding hands, gazing intently into each other’s eyes, and
conversing more intimately by the minute. That day, I first
learned of the deep pain Belinda had experienced in her life, and
began to hope that I could help her heal from it. In any case,
this was the beginning of what I call the passionate month,
which was how long the magic lasted before Belinda withdrew
abruptly.
In my first desperate prayers for help with the acute pain
I felt over her leaving, I simplistically begged God to bring her
back—how could she just walk away from what we’d had?—
but his silence confirmed the futility of my pleas. While
working through my pain, however, I had the great good
fortune to discover what seemed to be the final piece to the
petitioning puzzle. From my reading of M. Scott Peck’s The
Road Less Traveled, I learned that the purpose of life is spiritual
growth, and in my own contemplations I realized that God is
much more likely to grant petitions with such growth as their
subject or their foundation. (His goal is for us to progressively
become more godlike ourselves.)
With regard to Belinda, then, it was easy to see why my
simple prayers for the restoration of the past were getting no
response: they completely ignored the fact of transformation or
growth for either one of us. With this insight in mind, I worked
hard to revise my requests, and began to ask God instead to
help both Belinda and me to grow spiritually. I dedicated myself
to being continually alert to ways I needed to change and
mature, and also asked him regularly to help her choose the
good as she decided what kind of adult she was going to be,
both vocationally and personally. (The latter activity was an
entirely self-interested effort on my part; I knew that her
choosing the good was my best bet for getting her to come
back to me someday.) In any event, there I was with the last of
the spiritual lessons I learned during this period: We have to be
willing to transform ourselves if we want God to answer our
prayers.
Over the next couple of years, Belinda and I were
sporadically in touch, but she was dating first demented Audra
and then “older woman” Nita, and experimenting with different
career possibilities and lifestyles. Chapter Two will end with a
dramatic meeting in the hallway at LSU in fall ‘98, when I
drove down and stalked Belinda in order to hand-deliver some
letters I had written her that had been returned with “NO SUCH
PERSON” printed rudely over her name. At the time, she was
putting in cocaine-fueled twelve-hour workdays at Nita’s bar
and seemingly staying in school only by the thinnest of threads.
After persuading her to accept the packet of letters “for the
sake of our long-term friendship,” I decided not to try to write
her or call her anymore, even sporadically. But I kept on
petitioning God for her growth.
Chapter Three: Contact: Listening to the Voice Within
[also now online in its entirety]
This chapter will open with a recollection of a moonlit
night in April 1999 when I was out jogging, rhythmically
pounding the neighborhood pavement the way I’d done daily
for years. As I rounded a corner into a clearing where fully half
of the starry sky was suddenly and breathtakingly visible, a
question presented itself to me, entirely unbidden: Would I be
willing to be just friends with Belinda, whom I no longer had
any contact with? Although I had high hopes that she and I
would eventually resume the relationship we had started to have
three years before, I had finally stopped badgering her about it,
and I had calculated that she wouldn't initiate contact with me
anytime in the foreseeable future. In addition to being beautiful
and brilliant, she was young (twenty-two), shy (pathologically),
and suffered from emotional damage that rendered involvement
with an older, more optimistic person like me impossible to
sustain. Why, then, I wondered, was this very distinct voice in
my head asking if I were willing to be her friend?
One reason the question was odd was that I had never
considered being Belinda’s friend instead of her lover. Having
gone from teacher-and-student to the beginnings of romance in
the space of one day, we two had never been just friends.
As I was running, this question that arose spontaneously in my
consciousness was clearly not my own thought. And because it
seemed godly in quality and aim, I recognized it as a direct
communication from that benevolent being who had long ago
let me know he ran this place we call the universe. I answered
right away, Yes, of course I'd be her friend—I love her. Then I
spent the next few blocks of my run marveling at the quaint and
charming prospect of becoming Belinda’s platonic friend. But
soon I realized that this meant I was going to have to come to
grips with the possibility of being her friend while she was
involved with someone else. My answer quickly changed to No
way. When I turned the matter over in my mind, however, I
began to see that this was precisely the type of challenge I
should expect from God, centering as it did on the notion of
unconditional love. So, asking his assistance, I made up my
mind to be alert to lessons I needed to learn that would prepare
me to be Belinda’s true friend.
The chapter will also explore the spiritual meaning of a
series of vocational events that happened to me about this same
time. After failing to be offered a university class to teach for
the upcoming fall semester, I chanced to chat with a certain
modern-day Renaissance man who unwittingly challenged me
to do more with my life than I was presently doing, which was
editing freelance and caring for my wheelchair-bound,
Alzheimer’s-patient mother. I had coached Luther in swimming
when he was a kid, and when he simply asked me what else I
was doing, I suddenly realized I couldn’t justify “Nothing” in
my own mind, let alone his. That very evening, I embarked on
some earnest soul-searching, including many petitioning
conversations with God. Eventually, these culminated in my
decision to try my hand at writing.
Returning to the Belinda story, I will recount my shock
over receiving, some weeks after the question from heaven, a
long snail-mail letter from her. She wrote straightforwardly that
she had temporarily given up dating and had recognized the
value of intellectual friendships, which she hoped she could
have with me. Because I found it hard to believe that the shy
Belinda would write me (or anyone else) out of the blue for the
mere purpose of reestablishing communication, I read between
the lines that she must really want things to heat up with me
again—an interpretation I liked quite a bit better than the friends-
only setup she described. This propensity of mine to project my
own thoughts and desires onto Belinda’s letters (instead of just
reading the damned things and thus accessing her mind) was to
continue for months and do plenty of harm.
At any rate, there I was with my answer to why God had
posed that challenge to me via spontaneous thought two months
earlier. And there I was with his response to my sincere
commitment to the project of becoming Belinda’s friend. Now I
found myself with a whole new set of things to petition him
about, chiefly the ins and outs of this new phase of my
relationship with her, which I was nothing less than thrilled to
be entering into.
Chapter Four: The Danger of Unrealistic Expectations
(June 1999 to March 2000) [also now online in its entirety]
One of the first things Belinda told me in our renewed
correspondence was that she had been seized by a mad desire
to become not a lawyer or an FBI agent (previous possibilities),
but a physician. “Overwhelmed,” she said, by a desire to heal
others, she was taking the required pre-med courses, and
reported that for the first time in her life, school was
challenging and exhilarating. That getting into med school was
all she thought about. And that she felt content for the first time
ever. How I thanked God for granting my petitions for her
growth so thoroughly! She was still shy, and still damaged, but
this was a truly significant development.
And so it went that Belinda and I emailed back and forth
regularly the first five months after she had initiated contact
with that first letter. And sometime in November, I started
thinking how perfect it would be for the two of us to meet on
that most romantic of evenings, the millennial New Year’s Eve.
I knew Belinda had given me no concrete evidence suggesting
she was interested in becoming romantic with me again, but I
reasoned that we had been platonic friends for five whole
months now, and she had written quite a few lengthy and
intimate emails— and I was still misinterpreting the whole idea
of her having contacted me in the first place, by viewing
everything in light of my romantic fantasies. So on this very
flimsy basis I began constructing an elaborate scenario in which
we would usher in 2000 with a reunion celebrating the love we
had shared during the passionate month and looking ahead to
the future. I didn’t word it quite so explicitly in my invitation,
but I did write her and tell her how much I would like for us to
get together for that special night.
My invitation wasn’t necessarily a mistake in itself, but
whenever I tried to appeal to God to make our hot date become
a reality, I found it impossible to get any real faith going at all.
In Chapter Four I'll explore how I dealt with this problem; one
way was to delve into the subject of “type psychology.” From a
book called Type Talk (by Kroeger and Thuesen), I learned that
the most significant characteristic by which personalities differ
was introversion versus extroversion, and I recognized pretty
quickly that Belinda was a strong introvert, which likely meant
she was exhausted by interaction, especially interaction with
talkative people like me. So, though it was hard for me to
comprehend, it was a documented fact that introverts could
genuinely like someone yet not always feel like talking to that
person. In fact, that person may be extra stressful for the
introvert to talk to, since real communication may be more
likely to occur. What a valuable little tutorial for God to have
sent me about Belinda!
The metalesson here was that when I focused on learning
about Belinda as a separate human being rather than spinning
my fantasy about the romance, God readily provided the
educational experiences I needed. I didn’t take to that
overarching truth, though, because I wasn’t ready to give up
my quest for the New Year’s Eve date.
In mid-December, feeling desperate that time was running
out, I made a list of practical petitioning suggestions tailored
especially to that situation. Each of these strategies had worked
for me in the past, such as when I landed the assistantship in
my master’s program or when I prayed before teaching at LSU.
Reflecting the fact that maintaining a faithful mood is absolutely
essential to the whole enterprise, these were my tips for
successful petitioning when I felt that my back was up against
the wall:
1. Force yourself to Act as If, EVEN IF you're completely
pretending.
2. Use what little faith you do have left to ask God to restore
your faith.
3. Ask him to make sure you're strong enough to accept a NO
answer, but also to help you believe that he'll do all he can
(within the big plan, that is) to facilitate a YES.
4. Remind yourself that God WANTS you to believe: "Without
faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews 11).
5. Sing hymns or Christmas carols or whatever gets you in a
faithful mood; it's OK to play tricks on your mind in this sense.
The problem for me at this particular time was that I
knew in my heart of hearts (though not in my conscious mind)
that what I was asking God to do for me was unrealistic, at
least in the form in which I was imagining it. My suppositions
about New Year’s and romance were entirely egocentric,
having nothing to do with Belinda or anything she had said in
her writings.
Nevertheless, the list is an accurate encapsulation of some
effective techniques to stave off despair. I think the
hopelessness I was starting to feel was precisely the reason I
was able to produce it so forcefully. Therefore, I will
encourage my readers to take heed, but to remember that these
techniques work only if they have determined, by listening to
God and their consciences, and by considering objective
evidence based on the behavior and comments of other people,
that what they’re asking for is realistically possible.
Among other highlights of the chapter will be some
changes that I saw I had to make in myself if God was to grant
any of my petitions, including those for the resumption of my
contact with Belinda, who had clammed up and stopped
emailing after I issued the big invitation. One such change was
the seemingly impossible task of overcoming my anger and
impatience. Through a series of trivial incidents that set off my
fury (a new neighbor’s request that I “curb my dog,” a long
wait at a customer service counter due to a credit-card foul-
up), God called my attention to the work I needed to do. Only
after much resistance and with fervent prayer was I finally able
to make the decision to turn my temper over to God and allow
him to remake it in his image.
Another change I saw I needed to make was to learn to
perceive and accept the many aspects of Belinda’s mind that
were foreign to my own nature. Up to now, I had been largely
ignoring the thousands of words she had written me about her
tormented relationship with Audra and about her own demons,
blithely thinking that all she needed to do was spend some time
with good ol' wholesome me to be cured of all the darkness. I
now realized that I had to stop filtering her actions and words
through my own desires and expectations and start paying
attention to her. One day in a fit of passion regarding both these
changes, I dropped to my knees, took several deep breaths, and
concentrated as hard as I could on humbly asking God to
change me and truly letting him do so. Opening my arms to the
heavens, I relaxed my grip on myself, and suddenly I began to
feel physically lighter, freed from the shackles of my natural
personality. As I got to my feet, my heart fluttered with
excitement, as though anything was now possible.
Chapter Five: Change, the Only Certainty in Life (April to
August 2000)
Belinda got back in touch with me via a long, chatty email
in early April. Of course complications promptly ensued, as
they always do when we go from our imaginations to real
dealings with people. But as I worked to maintain the right
attitude about Belinda, God helped me move forward by making
me see that he was granting other petitions of mine outright.
One of these had to do with Bess, one of the sitters for
my eighty-nine-year-old mother, whom my brother and I were
keeping in her home (where I also lived) despite her Alzheimer's.
A quiet, sweet thirtysomething African American with a huge
beaming grin that showed itself all too infrequently, Bess had
several children, including seven-year-old Danielle, who Bess
said had been a real problem lately, yelling nonsensically and
hitting people for no reason. Danielle had been to the university
hospital neurology clinic for a CT scan and an EEG exam, but
they had both been negative, so the clinic had referred her to
the child-development department, where the appointment was
still months away. Bess told me she wasn’t sure the neurologist
had really understood how severe Danielle’s problem was.
Suspecting Tourette’s syndrome, I asked Bess if she’d like for
me to try to persuade the neurology people to give Danielle
another look. Smiling that big smile, she answered, “Oh, that
would be great! I don’t know if it’ll work, but that would be
great!” As I sat at my desk in contemplative silence, I recalled
what my father had taught me about asking people favors.
Daddy used to say that most people, when they were in a
position where they could help you out, felt honored if you
asked them to. And most of the time they would be more than
happy to grant your favor. Although Daddy hadn’t put his
advice in religious terms, it did imply a godly respect for all
creatures, a realization that helped me have real faith as I asked
God to facilitate my conversation with whomever I was about
to talk to at the neurology clinic. I made the sign of the cross
on my chest and took a deep breath, relaxing in God’s presence
before I dialed the number.
Even though I had enlisted God’s help, I was still
surprised when the receptionist said the neurologist could talk
to me right away. When he got on the phone, I established my
“credentials” immediately. “I’m a Ph.D. myself,” I said. “Bess
Jefferson works in my home caring for my mother, and I think
she’s probably described her daughter’s symptoms in more
detail to me than she did to you, and I just wanted to try to help
because I see how badly the kid’s problems are disrupting the
family. Bess said someone at the clinic had mistakenly thought
she had told them the spells only occurred at night, but that’s
wrong—it’s all the time.” In reply, he became highly technical,
musing about genotypes, phenotypes, and a couple of terms I
hadn’t even heard of, so that I had to tell him my doctorate was
not in science! But he nevertheless discussed the whole
situation with me quite specifically, and then transferred me to
his secretary so another appointment could be set up with him
for the very next week. The new examination led to Danielle’s
being accepted as a regular patient at the neurology clinic, with
a probable diagnosis of Tourette’s, for which they immediately
started her on an experimental drug therapy. A grave diagnosis,
to be sure, but Bess’s sheer relief over finally being taken
seriously was obvious when she told me the news. I was so
moved, I cried.
A couple of months later, however, another medical
situation found me at first failing to handle the problem with
prayer. In mid-June my mother, who was normally as
physically healthy as a horse, was admitted to the hospital with
an unidentified gastrointestinal ailment, and it took me three
days to think of asking God to relieve her pain. The delay seems
to have been a function of the chaos my life had suddenly been
thrown into; the sitters, the wheelchair, and the usual hassles of
caring for Mom at home had been abruptly replaced by a blur
of hospital staff, stretchers, and an unfamiliar set of concerns
about things like making sure the various nurses knew that
Mom’s doctor had waived the requirement that she be turned in
the bed every few hours, because she was unable to sleep
except on her right side. Since I wasn’t inclined to ask God to
extend her life—she was ready to go if ever anyone was—it
took me a while to realize I could ask him to make her feel
better even if she was about to die.
Employing my own personal prayer triad, I crossed
myself three times, as I went through the mental tasks of
forgiveness (of the medical team for various decisions and
actions I had found exasperating), humility/submission (in the
face of the Creator’s power and omniscience), and faith (that
he would be willing to grant this request). I did this several
times the third night of Mom’s hospitalization, and the next day,
the doctors succeeded in ridding her of the GI obstruction that
had been the source of her discomfort. By the time I got there
for my evening visit, my heart swelled with joy at the sight of
her sleeping peacefully. Up till then, she had continually made
these little puffing movements with her lips—PUH, PUH, PUH—
and other guttural noises that had indicated her pain. I was truly
thankful. She still had a touch of pneumonia, which they had
discovered when she had first gone to the ER, but she was
infinitely more comfortable.
It wasn’t long before she even felt good enough to eat.
For several years, the ritual of my feeding her her supper had
been a mainstay of our interaction, the best opportunity for me
to give her love and affection in a way she could understand.
Her taste preferences having regressed along with her cognitive
abilities, she loved junky things, and I was grateful to see that
she now happily agreed to try some chips and Ro-tel dip I had
made for her. Hamming it up as I usually did at home, I
presented the plate with a mock flourish, telling her that it had
been prepared especially for her by Sara Witsell Anderson, the
greatest cook in the world. She giggled and said, “I love you,”
which was her stock phrase the last few years of her life.
Alzheimer’s patients frequently become one-word speakers in
the last stages of the disease, and I think it was an emblem of
how happy my brother and I—with the help of the sitters—
were able to keep Mama that she settled on “I love you” as her
answer to everything.
In any event, she ate about five chips with plenty of dip
before she started coughing and had to stop. Beginning the next
day, her pneumonia worsened, and she died peacefully three
days later. I immediately recognized the chips-and-dip episode
as a gift from God, a chance for us to have a last bit of normal
interaction between her feeling so bad from the GI ailment and
her dying from the pneumonia. I thanked him profusely, not
only for that but for her good long life as well.
Chapter Five will also recount my petitioning struggles
and learning regarding several other issues. One was my writing
Belinda a big letter whose purpose was to break a year-long
cycle wherein she would enthusiastically accept my tentative
invitations to get together, but then as the time neared would fail
to respond to my emails until enough time had passed so that
we would both simply pretend to have forgotten about the
tentative plans. With God’s help in composing it, I now invited
her to make a serious effort to cultivate our friendship. Another
issue was my volunteering to tutor at the Adult Education
Center but then instantly regretting my enthusiasm and
wondering how to get out of the commitment gracefully. The
chapter will reveal how I worked through my fears and doubts
in dialogue with God, who showed me what changes I had to
make in my thinking before he would grant my petitions for a
satisfactory resolution to the problem.
Chapter Six: Positive Thinking (September to November
2000)
In early fall, walking rapidly from the magazine area in the
very back of Books-a-Million to the coffee shop in the very
front, I practically knocked over a display that was jutting out
into the aisle—and that was how God chose to introduce me to
Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God.
The main thing I learned from the New Age Walsch was
that it's our images of ourselves that stand in the way of our
changing, growing, and getting what we want out of life.
Intriguing, since for years I had even had a sardonic name for
my own view of myself in regard to my love life: “Alone Again,
Naturally.” According to Walsch’s thesis, my Alone Again
complex was not only the result, but also the cause, of my
perpetual isolation. And changing this habitual view of myself
was absolutely necessary if I was to petition God with real faith
that he was going to put Belinda (or anyone else) back into my
life. But how in the dickens was I going to do this, since Alone
Again WAS precisely how I deeply and enduringly thought of
myself? Walsch seemed to think changing was simply a matter
of will power, but I knew that my only hope was to ask God to
batter my heart, to violently rip my old thinking out of me,
putting in its place a brand new view of myself as no longer
alone. My prolonged struggle to acquire this new mindset will
resonate with anyone who has ever tried to make a radical
alteration in their own outlook.
Whether Alone Again or not, in the months following my
mother’s funeral I had developed a terrific crush on the lady
priest who had preached Mom’s homily. Julia was tall, with
short auburn hair and a big dimpled smile, and outgoing to the
point of exuberance. She struck me as though she might be
gay, and I wanted desperately to become friends with her even
if she wasn’t. After I mustered the courage to invite her out to
dinner, God tried his hardest to send me some lessons about my
tendency to run my mouth, but when the evening finally
arrived, my excitement caused me to forget such lessons
altogether.
As soon as the waiter took our drink orders and walked
away, Julia commented, “He’s cute!”—and several times in the
next few minutes she touched on the subject of men in a way
that made it obvious she was completely straight. With the
suspense about her sexual orientation over, I should have
gathered my wits and made an effort to be a better
conversationalist. Instead, I gave an Academy-Award
performance as a truly self-centered bore. I rambled about my
life and my views as though I thought Julia found me
fascinating simply because she had preached about my mother
four months before—and by the time I started to realize what I
was doing, it was too late to stop in my tracks. When I left the
restaurant, the pain was so great that I drove around numbly
for half an hour or so, too stunned with disappointment to go
home.
During my nightly run, as I begged God for help, I
realized that to profit from my experience, I was going to have
to relive it, as painful as I knew that would be. It was two more
days before I could bring myself to face my blunders and to
identify the many hard lessons that he meant to teach me
through my folly. In the chapter, I will describe how it felt to
recall such words as those I had uttered when Julia and I were
parting. To her cheery “See you at church,” all I had to do was
say right back at her “See you at church!” and let her leave.
But instead, my response was, “Yep, you’ll see me. When I
first started going back to church, I thought I would only go
occasionally, but I’m such a creature of habit that I can’t do it
that way. I either go to church every Sunday or I don’t go at
all—so I’ll see you Sunday.” Ouch! One way I gathered the
strength to endure this recollection was to ask God to minimize
the blunders in Julia’s memory, as well as to help me learn the
lessons well enough to apply them in future conversations.
The end of my fantasy of becoming close buddies with
Julia caused my attention to turn back to Belinda, who still
hadn't answered my August invitation to start actively
cultivating our friendship. I had told her in that letter that I
wasn’t going to write her again until she answered my question.
Now, I vacillated between hope (that all I needed to do was to
drop her a line reminding her that the invitation was still good)
and despair (that what I really needed to do was to finally get
the message and leave her alone). Every time I would ask God
for guidance, however, I found myself considering how much
he had already caused to happen in this relationship, and how
much good could potentially come from it. I knew that Belinda
shared my intellectual approach to life, my love for poetry and
good writing, and my desire to serve the world as a means to a
higher sense of fulfillment. I thought that our friendship would
help get Belinda out of her shell, and would energize us both to
do good for the world. It seemed clear that keeping the faith
was what I ought to do.
Armed with these thoughts, on Halloween night I wrote a
rough draft of a new letter to Belinda. Then, as the chapter will
show, I spent the next several days struggling mightily against
my doubts and fears. It was only after much pleading with God
for help, and many revisions, that I finally brought myself to hit
Send.
Although Belinda said she had taken my three-month
silence to mean I had become disgusted with her shenanigans
and crossed her off my list for good, it still took her two weeks
to answer. She labeled her long letter “draft twelve” of her
efforts to articulate her response.
To put it simply, “draft twelve” was filled with wondrous
answers to many of my most fervent petitions. Eloquently
recalling her hot pursuit of me during the passionate month,
Belinda explained that she'd love to see me as often as possible
but had heretofore been prevented from doing so by fear and
insecurity. To my cosmically proportioned invitation to become
my friend for life, she said “YES!!!,” marveling at the “faith and
patience” I had shown her over the years, words I had never
used in my communications with her but had asked for many
times in my dialogue with God about her. I knew I had to keep
praying my butt off every step of the way—she said she was in
many ways “still . . . a timid little girl”—but I approached this
new stage of our relationship overflowing with exhilaration and
determination to never again lose faith that God had it all under
control.
In Chapter Six I will also describe dialogues with God on
behalf of my elderly aunt Sasa, who had asked me for advice
regarding her depression, and about the improvement of my
work with Don, the disabled young man I had now been
tutoring at the Adult Ed Center for several months. Also, in light
of my new practice of attending worship services regularly for
the first time in twenty years, I will comment on the limited
relevance of church-going to individual spiritual development.
While church can be the setting of heightened spiritual
experiences—one of which will be depicted in this chapter—it
can also get in the way of our private attempts to find God. The
people and the music (especially when it’s as fantastic as it is in
my church) can serve as psychic fillers that keep us from
acknowledging the emptiness we feel, which can only be truly
satisfied by one-on-one communication with our Maker.
Chapter Seven: Keeping the Faith through Misfires
(December 2000 to September 2001)
Chapter Seven covers the ten months following my
receipt of Belinda’s draft twelve, months I might have
expected to be more or less blissful between the two of us.
Well, I would have been wrong. It was more like a ten-month
roller-coaster ride, which I endured successfully only by the
strength I gained from my petitioning. In December, she and I
emailed volumes and she sent me a beautiful Christmas card
with the two female angels walking side-by-side from William
Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder, with a note inside so loving and sweet
that it was all I could do not to jump into my car and drive
down to Baton Rouge, burst into the furniture store where she
worked, and scoop her up in an ardent embrace. (By “friends
for life” I had not meant to exclude romantic involvement, just
to establish that we would always be true friends regardless of
whatever else happened. I wanted to be as close to her as I
could be, and rekindling the romance seemed a great way of
deepening our bond. I had accepted that it might never happen,
but at this point I was still quite hopeful that it would.) But then
when I did spend the day at her apartment on the 26th, a
miscommunication beforehand caused us to start out on the
wrong foot, and we suffered through six hours of awkward
non-togetherness. The following May, she surprised me with an
invitation to her college graduation, and I surprised her back by
attending but failed to find her after the ceremony, so that I
ended up spending the whole weekend alone in a motel room,
alternately working on my laptop, trying to get in touch with
her, and hurting. And after a very nice summer of
communicating quite a bit, mainly via Belinda’s voluminous
email “tomes,” we had a dinner engagement in early September
whose highlight was a prolonged and mean-spirited debate
about the existence of God. Although during the passionate
month Belinda had seemed to share my views on that issue—
and indeed that was one of the reasons I had continued to
pursue her—now she was pumped full of scientific
pontification seemingly straight from the mouth of some
biology professor who apparently viewed the very idea of the
supernatural as a threat to his or her treasured theories of
evolution and the Big Bang. Sitting on the floor of another motel
room of mine, Belinda threw out such phrases as “it’s a proven
fact that Homo Sapiens did not appear on this planet in one
divine flash” and “the idea of God is folklore, plain and simple,”
spectacularly shooting down my assumptions about her spiritual
state. And oh, how that hurt. When she left, I slumped into the
easy chair, holding my head in my hand and begging the
Creator for help.
Some other petitioning highlights in Chapter Seven include:
•Dealing with my own Dark Night of the Soul, a deep spiritual
depression that engulfed me. God was still in his heaven, but I
was failing to muster up enough faith to ask him to reach down
and pull me out of the abyss I had fallen into. At first, all I
could do was keep my mind off the pain by staying active
during the day and then trying feebly to pray for quick sleep at
night. But after a couple of days, I began to feel ever so slightly
less alienated from God, and then I was able to do what has
always struck me as a kind of spiritual surfing: I would wait for
the next cyclical rise of my mood and try, using the faith I
knew intellectually was in there somewhere even though I
couldn’t feel it at the time, to ask God to restore my faith to the
fullest. The idea here is to catch the wave of relatively good
feeling at the cusp and ride it as far as you can toward the
shore of your restored relationship with God. Just as in real
surfing, you put yourself into position, but the main thing that
carries you forward is the wave of better feeling that follows
your darkest spells in the natural ebb and flow of things.
Although this surfing can take several days to work, for me it’s
a pretty reliable technique.
•Becoming aware of the beauty around me—the entire breadth
of sunset, acres and acres of uninterrupted gold and red blazing
across the hills and fields—as I drove home from a dinner in
the country. “God, you made this beautiful sunset, so help me
never to forget this tangible demonstration of your power, so
that whenever I ask you for something, I can truly believe that
you can give it to me if you want.”
•Taking on an important task of transformation connected to
my petitions for tutee Don’s progress with his newly acquired
computer. My prayers were being blocked by a certain
fundamental scorn I harbored toward his friends and neighbors,
who I thought ought to be more willing to come over and teach
him the basic skills. I didn’t know any of them personally, but I
imagined that whoever they were, they should be able to find
the time to go over and help the poor CP patient in the
wheelchair learn how to use his computer. In order to clear the
way for God to grant my petitions, I saw that I first had to ask
him to remake my contemptuous feelings toward these
“shiftless” folks as a group. It took a long time for me to simply
make up my mind to relinquish my feelings to God, but I finally
did. And then, one method that worked to accomplish the
change itself was to examine my feelings in detail, which
showed me clearly that I had no right—or really any reason—to
feel the way I did, and then to take a deep breath and imagine
God flushing the feelings out of me as I exhaled.
Chapter Eight: Accepting Differences (October 2001 to
February 2002)
Before the next two evenings Belinda and I spent together,
in my petitioning conversations with God I realized that the only
thing I could legitimately ask him to do was to help us lay the
best possible foundation for our long-term relationship—not to
magically restore the old Belinda to the way she used to be.
Although I was still hopeful that the romance might rekindle, I
knew that the friendship was the most important thing, and the
only thing that I was positive he willed for us. In my best
moods, moreover, I admitted that the God debate, in all its
bitterness, had been vitally important as part of that foundation
we needed to lay, so I asked for the strength to endure
whatever else was to come. And he heard me, and granted
these petitions, although at the time I was almost too busy
reeling from momentary blows to my faith in the good Belinda
to notice. Her demons were so vicious that when she shared
them with me, the experience was almost harsh enough to
cause me to turn and run the other way, at least in the sense of
ending my pursuit of her friendship. In the two fall visits, she
laid bare for my view her obsessions with medieval weaponry,
a 1950s murder trial of some teenage lesbians who had
coldbloodedly smashed one of their mothers’ skulls with a
brick, and Audra’s evil nature, which continued to “enthrall”
Belinda in a way that I (vanilla-flavored, emotionally sheltered I)
could not make heads or tails of.
After each of these encounters, I struggled mightily in my
dialogue with God. The first time, I learned that if I wanted him
to help, I had to give up a secret wish of mine that Belinda
would stop associating with people I self-righteously thought
influenced her negatively, especially her only sibling, a drug-
addled older sister. The second time, he posed a much bigger
challenge: I needed to truly accept that it was at least possible
that Belinda’s and my getting together romantically would never
be feasible because of our differences.
Every fiber of my being resisted that move for about two
weeks, but I finally did what I knew I had to do, submitting my
will on the issue and asking God to help me learn the platonic-
friend lesson once and for all, even if it had to be permanent.
This act of submission led to a major epiphany for me, which I
related to Belinda under the email heading NEWS FLASH
(which I admit was a news flash to no one but me): that, at the
present time, she and I were not compatible enough to be
lovers, and possibly we never would be. In her reply, her relief
was palpable, and she made it clear that she was as interested
as ever in continuing our friendship.
On the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s,
Belinda and I dined at the same restaurant where she had taken
me the very first time we had ever gone out, at the height of
our magic nearly six years earlier. I was pleasantly surprised
over and over again as her good humor and pleasure in my
company seemed only to increase as the night went on.
When the evening ended back at her apartment in the wee
hours of morning, Belinda, a self-professed nonhugger,
shocked me by initiating a tender goodnight embrace. I floated
to my car and sang hymns of praise the entire two-and-a-half
hours home. Even so, it wasn’t until several days later that I
recognized this new Belinda as God’s precise granting of many
of my most cherished petitions.
Other spiritual events examined in the chapter include a
particularly heinous instance of losing my temper. I chewed out
a young Gateway representative over the phone for no reason
other than I thought he was wasting my time with his
incompetence—and afterwards, my first reaction was to
rationalize that I had learned to control my temper a long time
ago, so that this was just a little anomaly that I could forget
about. God, however, refused to accept that excuse, instead
forcing me to think deeply about the humiliation I had caused
the poor fellow. I don’t feel guilty about many things, but I did
about this. The sheer nerve of me, popping off at this pitiable
kid not a week after God had graced me with the enchanted
evening with Belinda. I felt so bad, any petitioning activity I
might have engaged in was made impossible by my mood. And
for a while there, it seemed God would have nothing to do with
my efforts at repentance. I think he just wanted me to suffer
long enough for my guilt to teach me a lesson. Finally, by
begging him to make the Gateway boy feel better and to help
me fix this incident in my mind to ensure that it never ever
happened again, I was able to work my way back into a
position from which I could pray effectively.
The next time Belinda and I went out to dinner, the mood
was very different from the holiday festiveness, because now
she was preoccupied with her failure to get into medical school
and concerned about how she might improve her chances the
second time around. I wanted nothing more in the world than to
help her in this endeavor, and had petitioned God about it quite a
bit beforehand. He really delivered, because we spent hours,
first at an old favorite bar and grill and then back at her
apartment, formulating a multi-pronged attack on the obstacles
Belinda felt had hindered her thus far. I found the evening
personally gratifying, too, as Belinda convinced motormouth me
that she liked it when I rambled. Saying goodnight, she initiated
another long, slow parting embrace, and as I stood there in her
arms in the crisp, starlit, February-night air, suddenly the old
question of romance didn’t seem so important anymore,
compared to the meeting of souls that had occurred over the
past few hours. Not only were both of us beginning to be
transformed radically—Belinda out of her shell, I out of my
misanthropy—but we were also entering into a bond of sharing
that would empower us to go out and serve the world in our
respective vocations.
Chapter Nine: Submitting the Will (March 2002 to May
2003)
Despite how well things were going with Belinda, it
wasn't long before I had another big lesson to learn regarding
her. What happened was that I, like an idiot, made a jealous
comment upon learning that she had ongoing weekly plans with
some people from work, to which she responded in no
uncertain terms that I had better quit “keeping score,” and of
course she was right. In my dialogue with God following the
exchange, I realized that if I wanted him to repair the damage,
then I needed to leave Belinda alone for a while and branch out
more to other people myself. No big deal, just a breather of
sorts.
The biggest thing I did in the way of branching out was to
go to New York in June to meet up with some college friends.
Even though Lynn and Serena are two of the most important
people on the planet to me, and even though we had an
incredibly marvelous time, the main reason I went was so I
could tell Belinda about it. I viewed her as my “significant
other,” which, at that time, meant that nurturing our relationship
was my top priority, period. Another reason I made the trip was
simply to follow where God was leading me, which I knew by
how inexplicably perfectly everything worked out once I started
making reservations, buying theater tickets, and the like. And
when I got back, my efforts were rewarded big time when
Belinda took me out to dinner at a fancy new Italian restaurant
and then to her favorite bar, where we stayed till the 3:00 AM
closing time because we were having so much fun talking.
During that conversation, she revealed that she routinely printed
out my emails and carried them around her apartment for about
a week in order to “soak up the wisdom.” What a tremendous
granting of my many petitions for her to like what I wrote to
her!
Throughout the remaining eleven months that Chapter
Nine covers, our relationship flourished. I petitioned God to
help Belinda as she applied to med school for the second year in
a row, always starting my dialogue with him from the reality of
her shyness, which was the biggest obstacle she needed to
overcome. Well, no one who knew her could get over the
spectacular result: she actually did so well in her most important
interview that the interviewer told her he was rating her a “1,”
which he said he had only given once before in twelve years of
interviewing. After she had been accepted into med school, she
remarked that if it hadn’t been for me she probably would never
have gotten in, which may be true, but it wasn’t really me, it
was God responding to my prayers.
Some other petitioning projects discussed in this chapter
will include my work on forgiving an elderly uncle for his
puritanical attitudes and my pained dialogue with God for help
following a conversational gaffe at a Christmas party. But the
project with perhaps the biggest life lesson was another
problem I had with that old nemesis, my anger.
Although I had improved in that area quite a bit, I still had
far to go. The instance of anger that I now needed to turn over
to God was my supreme irritation over some educational plans
of Don’s that I disagreed with. Every time the subject came up
during our tutoring sessions, I would feel my blood shoot up
through my head as I expressed my disapproval by clenching
my fists in rage. As I talked to God about it, asking him to help
in any way he could, I recognized the lesson attached to this
problem as something I had needed to learn for a long time: to
stop trying to control everything. Abandoning my efforts at
control, especially regarding something that was going to
remain part of my daily life (meaning I couldn’t simply never
think about it again), was one of the hardest things I’ve ever
done. It felt as though I was releasing my grip on something
(Don’s plans) and thereby letting it loose into the swirling chaos
of the universe, whereas before I had been able to steer it
where I knew (or thought I knew) it needed to go. Very
difficult, but also one of the most valuable life skills I’ve ever
learned.
To be sure, the themes of anger and lack of interest in
others were things I always needed to work on in one way or
another. Some people seem to think that when an undesirable
trait keeps reappearing, that means the person’s transformation
wasn’t genuine. I disagree. I think all of us have core negative
traits (original sin, if you like) that challenge us over and over,
so that we have to continue to let go of them and ask God to
take them away. But we can be truly transformed in the sense
that we can succeed in turning over specific instances of our
sins, and sometimes even the whole sin itself, at least
temporarily. And as long as we keep trying in good faith to
grow in godliness, our movement is in the form of an upward
spiral. Thus we can continually draw nearer and nearer to the
source of the universe’s power, even if we can never reach it
once and for all during this life. The take-home message is
simply, don’t give up if you lose your faith or return to your old
habits! Just climb back in the saddle and start your petitioning
dialogue all over again.
Chapter Ten: Persevering amid Scrapes and Snares (June
2003 to April 2004)
The first spiritual challenge I will discuss in this chapter
was the one I faced upon learning that Belinda didn’t want me
to visit her for July 4th in Mobile, Alabama, where she had
moved just a few days before in order to begin med school.
First and foremost, I had to choose whether to feel sorry
for myself or to pray. Though that may sound simplistic, the
fact is that this choice is a vital part of the petitioning process
as well as of the overall petitioning outlook on life. It was only
after I made the choice of praying rather than complaining that
I was able to talk to God and send up some sincere requests
that he use the time to make Belinda continue to rejoice in our
friendship and to truly want me to come visit after she got
settled.
My choice of prayer over complaint also paid off an
immediate dividend by making me much happier over the
holiday than I would have been otherwise. I had a surprisingly
nice time on the 4th at my nephew Sam’s house, and
throughout the weekend I was able to send up several more
petitions—with faith—for the furtherance of Belinda’s and my
friendship in this new phase of her life.
When I finally did go to Mobile a couple of weeks later,
oh, man, were those petitions granted on a grand scale. Simply
put, Belinda spent practically the entire weekend declaring her
appreciation of me and of us. In her car on the way to dinner
the first night, she was showing me the school when we
somehow got into a debate over whether she and I would still
be able to see each other if she started dating someone. When I
maintained that although I would always be her friend, I didn’t
think it very likely that we would still see each other under
those circumstances, she stopped the car in the middle of the
street and turned to look me directly in the eye. “OK, then I just
won’t ever date anybody in my whole life. This is the most
important relationship I have, so I just won’t ever date anybody
in my whole life.” The only way I was able to satisfy her
enough to get her to drop the subject was to say that I agreed
that it was possible for her to date someone and still see me. I
loved every minute of this conversation and silently sang praises
to God the whole time it was going on!
Several months later, I again felt initial disappointment
when I learned that my dissertation director/guardian angel
Karen Eliot was going to miss the 2004 John Donne
conference, which we both normally attended every year. She
had missed it once before, and as a result, I had felt partly
invisible and partly awkward without her there performing the
function of including me in conversations that otherwise I
wouldn’t have been able to follow. As I began to think through
the matter, however, I recognized her absence as a challenge
from God to me, to become more adept at conversing with all
kinds of people without Karen’s assistance. So, as the chapter
will show, I petitioned him fervently to help me be more
sociable and communicate better with others, all others, asking
them about their work and truly listening to what they had to
say. For years I had worked, but only sporadically, on
improving my eye contact and not letting things get past me in
conversations, trying to develop the habit of asking people to
repeat themselves if I didn’t understand what they had said.
This meeting of scholars whom I already liked and admired was
a perfect opportunity for me to make a real improvement in
those skills. Once the conference was underway, each day at
lunch I slipped off unnoticed and walked on the beach, feeling
very close to God as I reviewed the morning’s successes and
failures and asked him to make the afternoon fruitful, helping
me remember always to focus on others rather than myself. It
worked quite well, as I engaged in so many conversations
during the coffee breaks and receptions that I actually lost track
of some of them, which was unusual for me.
Although Chapter Ten marks the beginning of the cancer
story, for most of the chapter my breast lump is more a
nuisance than anything else. My gut reaction to the disruption
of my normal schedule by the various doctor and clinic
appointments was annoyance, but thanks to the wisdom I had
gained from my petitioning, I quickly recognized the error of
that small-minded attitude. Since the diagnostic tests were
spread over a period of five months, my conversations with
God about them are spread out accordingly. During this period,
the main lesson I learned was that I was simply not in control
of my health no matter how good care I took of myself. In
fact, I realized that cancer or anything else was that much more
likely to strike if I continued to commit the sin of health pride, if
I could coin that term. I knew I was terribly proud of my health
and disdainful of those who didn’t take care of theirs. In the
past I had made some half-assed efforts to overcome this
attitude, but, judging by the feelings I often experienced in the
waiting rooms of doctors’ offices, I hadn’t succeeded. I knew
I needed to do better.
Another type of disdain for a whole group of people that I
had to lose during this time was my intense dislike of old
people, which I discovered when trying to pray for my ninety-
year-old uncle after my aunt died, leaving him wanting
desperately to go ahead and join her. The chapter will reveal the
work I did on this problem, which was to grapple with my
feelings for my late father and ultimately to send up a prayer not
to God but to Daddy, in which I apologized for having
sometimes acted ugly to him, and then asked him to step in and
urge God to hurry up and take my uncle home.
After a second ultrasound exam of my breast lump, the
radiologist said to give it six more weeks and if it wasn’t
significantly smaller by that time, to have it biopsied. During
that period, I realized that I should thank God every day, even
more than I already did, for the mere fact of my excellent
health. I also saw that I should never worry about the what
if's—what if I had to get a biopsy or what if it was cancer.
Instead, in these six weeks, I should joyfully thank God every
day for how unbelievably great I felt. My favorite time to do
this was mealtime, because I also liked to thank him for
inventing the phenomenon of eating, which in my opinion was
so pleasurable that there was no way blind evolution could be
responsible.
Events culminated with my being diagnosed with cancer.
At first I was numb with shock, but in about thirty seconds I
recognized that God had let me develop this dreaded disease in
order to teach me to stop being such a control freak about my
health, especially when I let my silly eating-sleeping-exercise
routine interfere with my branching out to others. For a long
time I had been aware that it was sinful for me to decline social
invitations and the like if my only reason for doing so was to
adhere to my compulsive health practices, but I had kept on
doing it anyway. And now I knew that God was showing me,
in the vivid colors of the exam room and the loud, clear noise of
the surgeon’s voice, that my plan to take perfect care of my
health hadn’t worked at all. I didn’t necessarily have to stop
exercising and eating right, but I did have to stop giving it
priority over doing things for and with others. Moreover, if I
wanted to beat this thing as thoroughly as possible, then I had
better start paying attention when he tried to tell me that any of
my attitudes or behaviors were wrong or destructive.
Chapter Eleven: “What Are You Looking At?”: Cancer
Struggles and Lessons (April 2004 to July 3, 2004)
Because my experience with petitioning had caused me to
learn—and deeply internalize—that life is a series of lessons
designed to help us become holy, I never felt any real despair
over the fact that I had cancer. The very idea of the disease did,
however, help me focus on God’s power as never before, since
it was such a straightforward demonstration of the fact that I
could do everything possible to keep myself healthy and then he
could still pull the rug out from under me so easily.
A few minutes after recognizing the health-control-freak
lesson, while still sitting in the exam room of the surgeon who
had performed the biopsy, I saw that another bit of spiritual
progress I needed to make was to radically change my attitude
toward someone I will call person X, who was part of my daily
life but whom I hated with a passion, and had for a long time,
for no reason other than X got on my nerves severely. X had
never done anything to deserve my antipathy; if anything, just
the opposite was true—X acted all lovey-dovey to me for no
reason, or rather, would have acted that way had I allowed it.
This did nothing but make me even more violently opposed to
X’s very existence. Perhaps the worst thing about this
particular sin was that I had never had any desire, not even
momentarily, to relinquish my hatred. The way I knew now
that such a transformation was connected to my disease was
that one of my very first thoughts as I began to digest the
diagnosis was that I absolutely detested the prospect of X
coming to visit me or sympathizing with me in any way. At first
I tried to ignore the spiritual challenge God was setting before
me and to maneuver around this problem on my own; I even
toyed with the idea of not telling anyone I had cancer except
my very closest friends, just to keep X away. But with the help
of signs, especially an email from one of those close friends
(Anne) saying that if I did that, then when people eventually
found out anyway, they would be hurt that I hadn’t told them, I
soon abandoned that dumb idea. And then, it struck me that if I
could truly let God change my attitude toward X, then I would
have a much better chance of having a mild experience with a
good result. Conversely, if I continued to hold onto my hatred,
he was likely to draw out the healing process in order to try
once again to teach me this very basic lesson.
Chemotherapy had always been my biggest fear; the
thought of sitting there letting poison be dripped into my veins
was extremely hard for a health nut like me to stomach. When I
realized that whether I turned out to need chemo or not—or
how much—could very well hinge on whether or not I let God
change my feelings about X, you bet I was motivated to let go
and let God. I had heard of forgiving in order to be healed, but
it had never hit quite this close to home! Batter my heart, I
entreated him, and replace my human nature with your nature.
Two days later, I reported that I could already feel God
making a little progress in opening up my heart to love X. But
as for the other project, of losing my arrogant, control-freak
attitude about my health, it had suddenly hit me, four days post-
diagnosis, that it tied in perfectly with the idea of
chemotherapy, because being slowly poisoned and having my
immune system compromised was precisely the opposite of
taking such obsessive care of my health. When I realized this I
was horrified, because it seemed a sure bet that God would
send me chemo to teach me the right attitude. Intellectually, I
recognized the utter arrogance of any of us humans, health nuts
or not, thinking we could control what happened to our health.
But emotionally, I knew I still needed to work on relinquishing
my grasp. Thinking about it some more, I saw that it was at
least possible for me to humbly beg God to remake my attitude
immediately, before the surgery, and then accordingly grant my
petition for no chemo. A good portion of Chapter Eleven will
recount the work I did in my effort to learn all the lessons and
make all the changes God was attaching to the cancer
experience, in as short a time as possible.
From the beginning, I was blessed with a more-than-
adequate support system, being in contact with all my friends
by email, especially Belinda, who said she was devastated and
wrote several times a day. I also talked to several people who
had had breast cancer themselves. Only once did I experience a
sadness and needy feeling, which hit me as I sat in church the
second Sunday after my diagnosis. Outside, it was one of those
impossibly sunny, crisp, unseasonably cool May days, the kind
that’s so achingly beautiful that it almost hurts your heart to
behold it, and I decided immediately to deal with my feelings by
calling Belinda and seeing if she could spare an hour or two
from her final-exam preparation if I drove over there for the
afternoon. Making one of my triple crossings on my chest
before dialing the number, I asked God to guide the call and
whatever sprang from it.
And boy, did he ever. Belinda accepted my invitation
enthusiastically, and during my visit she clearly thrived in the
role of helping me rather than the more familiar situation of me
helping her. Her help started out when she created the perfect
escape mechanism for me by teaching me to shoot her new
bow and arrows, and continued through one of our signature
three-hour dinners at the Mexican place, where she spent about
half the time we were there telling me reassuring things about
what was about to happen to me. I sent up a big thank you to
God for this, as well as for her obvious comfort and happiness
in her vocation. It was all evidence of her healing, which I had
petitioned for so many times.
When I was finally leaving Belinda’s place about ten, I
don’t even know who started it, but our goodbye hug quickly
became a communion of breasts. As though it was a contest to
see who could squeeze the hardest, as we pushed our chests
together and together and together, as if to transfer the
invigorating, healing youth of her bosom into mine by the force
we were creating with our bodies. All afternoon, starting with
the archery, I had marveled at how healthy and strong and
fresh she seemed, and now, to feel that strength and freshness
enveloping my body—I couldn't have imagined anything more
perfect for that moment in time. The whole thing was
reminiscent of the passionate month, except infinitely more
meaningful now, grounded as it was in a true give-and-take
relationship of love, trust, and respect. Recalling all that God
had seen us through over the years, so that she was still here
offering me her love and support, I was absolutely positive that
he had it all under control. After that, I was never afraid.
That I was no longer afraid didn’t mean my struggles
with petitioning God about the details of the surgery and the
post-surgical treatment were over. Using the hotline to heaven
that I had so painstakingly developed over the years, I found I
could ask him with quiet confidence to help me through the one
painful part of the entire experience, four injections of
radioactive material into the tumor for the sentinel-lymph-node
study prior to the surgery. (Basically, I was able to relax into
the will of the universe and know that whatever was being done
to my body was for the good of my soul, and therefore I could
simply lie there and let it happen without trying to fight back.)
And after the surgery, the cancer-free status of my sentinel
node meant I was immediately blessed with a good prognosis,
but it also meant I was faced with a hard decision whether or
not to have chemo, since there was now an 85% chance that I
would be fine without it. Because I was so hugely apprehensive
about the idea of chemo, I seriously considered not undergoing
it—and the hours and days of my struggles with that decision
fill much of the rest of the chapter. (I also struggled with the
other post-surgical recommendation, that of taking estrogen
blockers, which, quite simply, I resisted due to my own vanity.
I was worried that they would make me look and feel old.)
Between the surgery and the final decision about the
chemo (which I ultimately made in the affirmative, after only
the minimal four cycles were prescribed), I spent an absolutely
phenomenal weekend with Belinda in Tuscaloosa, during which
more of my petitions about her growth and her joy in our
relationship proved to have been granted. The only non-perfect
part of the entire two days was a fleeting jealous comment I
made at the very beginning when something she said reminded
me that she was still looking for her Ms. Right. But we
promptly resolved the matter, because I truly was fine with the
theoretical idea of her finding her honey; we had always
enjoyed “cruising chicks” together, and it was completely out in
the open that she (if not I) was serious about finding
somebody. Three weeks later, however, between the first and
second of my chemo treatments, that “theoretical” status
changed when she wrote that she had met “someone
wonderful.”
Chapter Twelve: Enlisting God’s Help in Coping with Loss
(the rest of July 2004)
In Belinda’s fateful email, she said she had been debating
how to tell me the news, knowing it was going to be hard for
me because I was so happy with what I had with her. She also
didn’t want to jeopardize my health for the rest of the
chemotherapy by upsetting the excellent spiritual state I had
maintained so far. She was right to be concerned! It had been
six years since she had dated anybody, and a big part of me had
thought she never would, although she had surely never tried to
mislead me regarding her hope of one day finding someone.
She, like me, was not interested in dating someone merely
to avoid being alone, and I had just thought it likely she would
never find anyone and we would carry on what we had come
to call our “passionate friendship” indefinitely.
Buffered by the shock I felt, and not wanting her to feel
guilty, I wrote back that it only hurt a little, and only because
what we had had for the past two-and-a-half years had been so
incredibly perfect for me. The first part was kind of a lie,
because it already hurt more than a little. Funny, just that week
in reaction to a friend’s story of having cried when her hair fell
out from chemo, I had been thinking how nothing ever made
me cry—so maybe God had to show me that something could
make me cry. Groping for my spiritual bearings, I tried to pray:
God, please let me learn all the lessons I’m supposed to learn
from this, and please let B learn all she can about herself and
about life, and please let this relationship with Nicole make her
happy, whether it turns out to be short-term or permanent. I
gather Nicole is a good, positive person, and that’s the most
important thing, but I really don’t know that for sure yet, so
help B keep her good self in mind no matter what N is like. And
please continue to maximize both of us individually and in our
friendship and our appreciation of each other. And please don’t
let this affect my good brain chemicals that are helping my
chemo experience. Thanks!
The next day, I wasn’t so upbeat. And so began a solid
month of voluminous journal entries as I worked through each
successive mental state that accosted me. At first the pain was
raw, and, although I knew in the back of my mind that God
would help me make sense of it if I asked him to, that was not
yet a real possibility on the day following Belinda’s email.
Whereas the day before I had been shielded from the worst of
the pain by being in shock, now I was feeling it in full force: I
feel like a shell of my normal self, an absolute shell. I’m lost.
At least this has renewed my sympathy for adults who get upset
over divorces and other breakups. I hope I’ll never again think
I’m more evolved than they are . . . . God, help me see what to
do next. You’ll have to batter my heart, because I’m not really
in the mood to listen.
After a week had passed, I had improved enough to
where I heard God speaking directly to me through a Sunday
sermon about how the most joyful life of all is that which
derives its fulfillment from service to others—not from self-
absorbed matters like relationships. In a few more days, I
realized in my dialogue with God that not only was he
challenging me to accept the fact that I no longer had my
passionate friendship with Belinda, the exclusivity of which had
been extremely satisfying to me, but he was also challenging me
to grow beyond the need for an exclusive relationship with
anyone. Although I found this prospect deeply exciting, the
unregenerate part of me was quite reluctant to simply let go of
my need and thereby (or so I thought) resign myself to being
alone forever. The chapter will reveal how I dealt with this
conflict, as well as with the spells of pain that continued to
occur intermittently; primarily, what I did was to prayerfully tell
myself to take the long view, to get my emotional energy from
doing things for others, and also to be open to new relationships
of all types. This stance felt truly right, so I asked God to keep
guiding me, and to keep guiding Belinda as well, because we
were absolutely still best friends and I absolutely still believed
that our friendship was meant to nourish and facilitate each of
us in our service to the world—which just happened to be that
key to abundant life.
Chapter Thirteen: Branching Out (August 2004 to July
2005)
It was August 1st before I shifted my attention to
something besides Belinda. Then I considered the chemo and
the petitioning I was doing in relation to it. After the sobering
experience of not being able to get the third treatment on time
because my white cell count was too low, I had stepped up the
frequency of my ongoing prayer. I regularly asked God to make
the stuff work, to minimize the side effects, and to make me
continue to be OK about actually sitting there letting them put
poison into my veins, which was still the hardest thing for me
to do. All these petitions were granted more than adequately, so
that except for the 48 to 72 hours after each treatment, when I
suffered from nausea and vomiting, I felt absolutely normal
during the entire course of the therapy. But the chemo was
challenging me, a great deal more than the surgery had, to
submit my will and my body to the medical establishment,
allowing them to make me ill for the sake of my long-term
health. It was also giving me the opportunity to face my biggest
fear and come out victorious. Without the chemo, my overall
cancer experience would simply have been too mild for me to
have made much spiritual progress at all. My instincts had thus
been right when I had chosen to accept the chemo
recommendation and petition God for a mild experience.
The following March, I happened to revisit the building
where I had received the very first cancer diagnosis, a
realization that occasioned joyful praise that the whole thing
already seemed a distant memory less than a year later. On the
way home, I belted out “Now Thank We All Our God,” and
tears of joy streamed down my cheeks. I firmly believed that
the reason my cancer treatment had gone so well was because I
had taken full responsibility for having contracted the disease,
which I had been able to do because of all I had learned in the
preceding few years about how life is a series of sometimes
painful lessons designed to help us become holy. I knew I had
brought on my cancer by—among other things—my defiant
attitude toward the medication Prempro, which I thought gave
me energy. When my friends had warned me of its
demonstrated link with breast cancer, I had replied, “I’ll stop
taking it when they pry it out of my cold dead fingers.” My
illness had been God’s way of challenging me to overcome that
self-absorbed, entitled-to-feeling-good mentality.
As for Belinda, I felt new pain upon learning that she had
met Nicole online, which indicated that she had been discontent
enough during our passionate friendship to seek a sweetheart in
what struck me (at first) as a drastic manner. I thought the best
way for me to handle this depressing news was to stop emailing
her regularly. After a few weeks, however, she wrote saying
she missed me, and when I talked to God about what to do, he
let me know that my next step up the spiritual ladder was to
become comfortable with the idea of being active friends with
her while she had a girlfriend. That work was sometimes
painful, as I came to terms with the fact that even though I had
been the only person outside Belinda’s family that she had
socialized with for several years, I had never been as important
in her emotional landscape as she had been in mine. (This meant
things hadn’t really changed as much as I thought they had.)
Nevertheless, during the eleven months covered by this
chapter, I put into practice the chief lesson of my cancer,
branching out to others more than ever before. During the work
week, I served lunch occasionally at a soup kitchen and
enrolled in a Spanish class at my church on Wednesday nights.
The lunches at Stewpot were a rapid-paced hour. First we
would work assembly-line style, dishing out the hot food—say,
lasagna, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, cornbread, and
cookies—as fast as we could onto plastic trays. Then we
would pause for the director, a jovial, animated black minister,
to give a brief pep talk (on life!) to that day’s crowd of hungry,
mostly homeless folks who had gathered at the tables in the
large dining hall. With his booming, spirit-filled voice, he would
then ask if it was anyone’s birthday, and usually one or two
people would raise their hands, so the entire crowd—servers
and all—would give a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,”
followed by a round of applause. The talk would end with grace
being said, and the instant “Amen” was uttered, we servers
would move as quickly as possible to carry the 150 to 200 trays
to the patrons before the food got cold. Many would voice
thanks, and all would devour the meal. In the “Spanish I” class,
about eight adults of different sizes, shapes, ages, and social
backgrounds had a laid-back good time studying things like
dental and medical terms and how to fill out personal-info
forms in Espanol, since the original purpose of the course had
been to prepare volunteers for the church’s annual medical
mission to Honduras. I had no plans to do that myself, but the
course was a great way to give expression to my new, less self-
absorbed identity.
On the weekends, I joined an online matchmaking service
myself and met an interesting, spiritual-minded woman, and
also started driving to Walls, Mississippi, to spend Sunday
afternoons with my toddler-and-infant great-nephews—neither
of which I would have bothered to do before Belinda had “left”
me. The woman and I emailed back and forth a good bit, and
met when she came through Jackson, but I was starting to
discover that I loved being single and so I told her I wasn’t
looking for a relationship. With the great-nephews, the reason I
wouldn’t have gone to the trouble before was because I had
thought I didn’t like kids very much, and had particularly never
understood why people carried on so much about the very
young ones. But they were there, and their mother (my niece)
and I have always been close, and I didn’t have anything else to
do since no more Belinda, so I did it, and was utterly shocked
at how much I liked them. They were so fresh and cute and
cuddly, and when they got to where they would light up in my
presence, I was hooked.
At any rate, I viewed all my new activities through the
prism of my ongoing dialogue with God. While none of the
other contacts were as intensely pleasurable as John and Alex,
the chapter will show that collectively they brought me
surprisingly great joy.
Epilogue: The Next Stage Spiritually?
From the standpoint of late summer 2005, I marveled that
after ten months of the dreaded estrogen blockers, I had no side
effects whatsoever, and felt absolutely great physically. I was
also happier in every way than I had been before my cancer,
having found (for example) an ineffable joy in the group
interaction of my Spanish class. Whereas in the past I had
avoided all such interaction because of my hearing impairment,
I had discovered that if I chanced to say something that made
the group laugh, the result would be a rush of pleasure that
almost made me shudder with delight. Moreover, in addition to
the joy I received from such new activities, I also felt infinitely
happier with my social and personal life now than I ever had
with Belinda, even after our relationship had evolved to its
extremely satisfying state. The magnitude of this happiness
seemed to be based on the fact that it was completely
independent of any particular other, although it was vitally
dependent on others in general. I now felt that I no longer had
the gap in my soul that I had lamented was suddenly unfilled
when Belinda had started dating Nicole. Through my
petitioning, I had navigated both my cancer and the end of
Belinda’s and my pseudo-romantic “passionate friendship,” and
the growth I had undergone had opened up a world for me that
was richer and fuller than anything I could have imagined when
my singular focus had been on Belinda.
As far as my prayer life went, I observed that the subjects
of my petitions to God had, at least for the time being,
undergone a radical shift. Whereas in the past I had only
infrequently felt inclined to pray for others, I now discovered
that many of the petitions I naturally wanted to send up were
precisely for others rather than for myself. I was continually
struck both by my own plenty and by the genuine problems that
seemed to be everywhere I looked: drug addiction, illness,
unemployment, problems within various types of relationships,
the pain of unwanted divorce, the maladies of old age, the pain
of having lost a child—the list went on and on. Formerly, my
method of praying for others had been to rather clumsily and
uninterestedly try to petition for them by imagining what
transformations they might need to undertake in order for God
to improve their circumstances, and then asking him to help
them undertake those transformations so he could then send
them what they needed or wanted. This system didn’t work
very well, for obvious reasons. Now, however, I still wasn’t in
a position to know what others needed to do to get God to help
them, but their needs had become my desires and wishes and
therefore the natural subjects of my petitions.
My lifelong friend Tim is a good example. Tim and I go
way back; he grew up being the best friend of one of my
nephews and also one of my most dedicated swimmers. As
adults, the fact that we’re both gay has increased our bond.
Tim had a successful advertising business in DC for a decade
after college, but finally packed up and came home because his
addiction to Xanax and other substances had led his partners to
buy out his share of the business. Several years after he moved
back, his mother, whom he was close to, was diagnosed with
terminal cancer at age sixty-eight, and several months later, she
died. For a variety of reasons, this was more than Tim felt he
could bear, and he tried to kill himself with an OD. However, he
didn’t quite succeed, and after a couple of weeks in the hospital
followed by a month in residential rehab, he was out again,
living in a halfway house, working at a low-paying, dead-end
job, and continuing his AA/NA course of recovery. All of Tim’s
siblings had good careers and thriving families, and I felt deeply
for him, being the only one who had nothing now that their
mother was gone. When he told me about his reasons for
having wanted to die, I countered with my opinion that he had
quite a bit to live for: “You know I’ve been telling you for years
that you’d make a terrific drug counselor.”
“Yeah, I’ve been looking into the master’s in sociology
that I could get from Millsaps [a local private college],” he
replied.
“But that’s so expensive,” I cautioned. “I think you should
see about going to Jackson State instead.”
“But I can get financial aid,” he responded absently.
With Tim’s current situation, both parents dead and himself
without even a decent salary much less any other money to his
name, I knew the private-school plan would still cost too much,
but had trouble convincing him of that fact, since he was
thinking like the privileged person he had always been. He
mentioned that he had an interview coming up to be a waiter,
where he could make more money, but he didn’t have that in
the bag yet, plus I thought his educational expenses would still
be too high. Therefore, during the week or so that Tim’s
situation was on my mind, whenever I would start to consider
what I wanted to ask God to do for me, one of the main things
I wanted was to see Tim get on the road to a new life.
In my dialogue with God about Tim, I articulated my
concern about his unrealistic attitude toward his financial
situation, and made specific pleas for him to find some kind of
well-paying work as well as to become interested in getting his
degree from a public university. In conjunction with these
efforts, I did what I had learned over the years must always be
done if we want God to grant our requests as fully as possible,
and that was to forgive everybody about whom I had any type
of negative feelings whatsoever, even if they had nothing to do
with Tim or his fortunes. (At this stage of my spiritual journey,
I knew that all forgiveness helps all petitioning, although it may
be true that it’s more important when the forgiveness task is
directly connected to the request.) Although I had successfully
conquered most of my major instances of anger and hatred, I
still had plenty of little everyday things that I found annoying,
which threatened to block my efforts to cultivate vital faith that
God would do what I was asking. Well, my project of
forgiveness worked, because God answered all my prayers
about Tim, who became a popular and happy waiter at a
decently lucrative restaurant, with plans to get his sociology
degree at a historically black school where as a “minority”
student he would owe no tuition whatsoever.
So this is what I meant when I said that the things I now
wanted to petition for were often the solutions to others’ woes.
Wow, I was truly and radically changed—and look how much
for the better. Think back for a minute to me at the beginning
of this narrative, accosted by God’s voice while out running
under the stars in April 1999, willing to rise to his challenge
only because I thought it might get me somewhere with
Belinda. Then look at me at the end, embroiled in others’
problems simply because I fervently desired that their situations
improve. Remember how I said that the purpose of life is for us
to progressively become more godlike ourselves? Well, this is
what I meant! I had most definitely advanced to the next stage
of the spiritual journey!
Petitioning God: How I Learned to Get
Prayers Answered—and Find Light & Joy
Prayers Answered—and Find Light & Joy
Petitioning God: SOME EXCERPTS