A Case for Praying Again
A family tragedy helped me reimagine prayer as a daily practice for clarity.
I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic schools. Twice a week for a decade and a half, I was made to go to church and pray. The Hail Mary, Lord’s Prayer, and Apostle’s Creed. We repeated them in English, but they might as well have been in Latin. Thousands of times I recited them, and I had no idea what they meant.
Just words passing by, never leaving a trace in my mind.
I went to church to satisfy my parents, but I had it in my head that as soon as I could get out, I would. Then, when I was 17, just months before college, something happened that forever changed my family’s lives, but mostly one person’s in particular.
My brother fell off the back of a pickup truck that I was driving. He landed headfirst onto the pavement, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and immediately slipped away into a coma.
I called my dad. He and my mom were sitting on Adirondack chairs next to a bonfire at the edge of our pond. I was standing in an empty parking lot illuminated by a single floodlight and the strobes of an ambulance, and it seemed that we couldn’t have been any further apart.
His greeting was heartbreakingly happy. I choked back tears and told him what happened. I could picture him on the other end, his smile falling slack, my mom’s probing eyes, then her panic, the darkness they would have to run through toward the house, the scramble to find their shoes, and the desperate drive to the hospital.
Just like that, everything was different. Forever.
I have many visceral, painful memories of that night, but most often I remember how much I cried. I didn’t really know, but I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I cried for every normal day my brother would never have. I cried for the years that my parents would devote to his recovery. I cried for my baby sister, whose innocent childhood would become a harsh reality. I cried because I felt guilty for being involved.
The next few months are buried somewhere in the deepest recess of my mind. The mash of a bleak Midwestern winter, the Christmas and New Year’s Eve spent in the hospital’s cafeteria, the bandages and all the tubes, the glances I would make at him hoping that he had miraculously improved, the drowsy beep of the machine indicating otherwise, and the stacks of uneaten tins of lasagna in our fridge, dropped off by friends, while we practically lived in the ICU.
But, also, somewhere in there is my one and only memory of being affected by a prayer.
When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process—one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.
This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.
Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. And I never returned to church or prayed again, either—yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.
It came to my mind recently while I was staring at the famous Blue Marble photo taken by astronauts in 1972, giving all of us on Earth the first glimpse of ourselves: pure, fragile, and isolated together in the vast expanse of space.
It seemed to me that if I spent some time every morning with this image, my day might be different. I wondered, if I could always be mindful of the true scale of time and space and my relative insignificance, might my anxieties seem smaller, too? Perhaps beauty more precious? Love more urgent? Honesty easier? Jealousies silly? Dreams doable?
This is a prayer, I thought. Or this is what prayer should be.
You can imagine how it all went wrong in the first place. Prayers might have been originally written to be helpful, to be mnemonic devices for recalling practical wisdom. But over time, the language and structure became unintelligible to laypeople, and their function morphed into something more like ritualistic loyalty oaths recited during ceremonies.
This is unfortunate because we need all the help we can get to live with clarity.
We are living in an epoch of optimization, yet we are further than ever from Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, the discipline to habitually practice virtues—like courage, generosity, and temperance—until they become part of our characters.
We’re overwhelmed with FOMO, self-help advice, streams of contradicting data, superficial influencers, and algorithms designed to capture our attention. And all of that is compounded by an industrial consumer complex that intimidates us to conform or else risk being odd. So we cleave to the mainstream, which doesn’t usually have our best interests in mind.
Perhaps one antidote to this mania is prayer.
I mean this in the Blue Marble sense. What if we dusted off the practice of centering ourselves with helpful reminders? We might write our own verses filled with wisdom we cherish, descriptions of imagery that inspire our humility, and memories that return us to what is most important. And we could make a habit of recalling these prayers to ourselves, quietly, to regain our strength.
I occasionally listen to
’s On Being, and one interview that has stayed with me since is a conversation with Alain de Botton. He made a compelling observation that many elements we now associate with religion—rituals, moral teachings, community gatherings—once belonged to a common cultural treasury. Over time, these practices were absorbed and institutionalized by religions.I used to love singing with others on Sundays and wondered why that kind of communal joy wasn’t more common outside of church. De Botton argues that practices like these still meet universal human needs and should be reclaimed to enrich secular public life.
I think it’s worth a shot.
I’ll tell you about an image in my mind that I try to think about every morning. I expect parents of young children might relate.
It’s not uncommon for me to lose my patience with my kids. I’ll become frustrated by their inconsideration, and I’ll snap at them just a little too quickly with too little tenderness. Then an hour later I’ll step into their room to turn off their reading light, and they’ll be crumpled up and asleep, clutching their stuffie, and I’ll just get zapped by the sight. How small and perfect they are. How big and new the world is for them. How boundless their excitement for it. How little they know. How much they need me to guide them. How I am their example.
At that moment, I feel connected to something profound. I suddenly have the deepest well of patience to be a parent.
We should be aware of when this happens, savor these moments, and somehow convert them to something we can recall so we can access those deep wells whenever we need them.
So that is why I am praying again. And singing, too.
P.S. It’s been 26 years since Noel’s fall. Before the accident, he was a passionate ice hockey player. He regained the ability to walk, but not to skate. That didn’t stop him. He learned to skate on a sled, and for more than a decade he has played goalie for the Fort Wayne Flyers.
My parents were not religious, but they did make me and my sisters say our prayers every night. I still do. Beautiful moving piece, Zach. <3
Zach. This touched my soul.