My first prayer is to a Christ far more fragile than I had imagined. Hanging nailed to a cross nailed to the center of a wall in L’abbeye Saint-Pierre de Moissac, He casts His eyes down to His emaciated ribs. His dying frame seems fragile, brittle. But here I sit, trying to catch His gaze, loud thoughts shaking me: this is not a prayer, it cannot be, I am not praying now.
I try to shove down my prayer, and John Ames floats up in replacement. A year ago, I encountered Gilead, a novel by Marilynne Robinson. Mr. Ames, an elderly Iowan minister, writes letters to his young son. With steady restraint, he explains what his child should know: about God, about their family, about living honestly.
I read each of his letters like they had been written for me. His tone nurtures you, holds you, hosts a personal sermon in that niche of the soul where stories murmur to life. I had never known God, nor any of my grandfathers. One was a communist and an atheist, but that is only hearsay to me. He’s an empty vessel for my projection. I admired him when I was enamored with such same subjects, but now those have fallen wayside and I may delude myself by imagining he was like Ames, and these letters were mine, those lessons about forgiveness and steady belief intended for me. He planted the seeds of prayer in my mind, convinced me that such earnest belief might be a boon to my soul.
A seed planted but not nurtured is given no chance to become beautiful. Here is my chance, in Moissac, facing this frail Christ. Is this a prayer? I am not praying now, I have nothing to say . . . I just sit here now, and my eyes feel pressurized, and I feel something else that I cannot yet name—but this is not a prayer, except it is, and it is God I am trying to convince.
Twenty minutes pass. I blink away from Christ, startled: I am in a church, and think the word prayer. Does He hear me?
The world returns: the pews’ woodscent, the light breeze lifting my armhairs, the silence of many minds whose thoughts beam up hundred-foot walls and burst out with whatever sunlight the stained glass reflects. Aside from prayer candles flickering before a statue of Mary, it’s the only light passing through.
I glide to her. She gazes not upon the flowers at her feet, nor upon the lady who murmured while signing the cross, but on these candles. Lit variously across hours or days, some wicks still flicker above the candle-rim, but others I can hardly see. The woman in front of me plunks a coin into the box and takes a smaller candle, lights it, and sets it in the center. I have no coins on me, so I bow my head.
And I begin to cry. Not weepingly, but the pressure breaks like a steady drip of water finally seeping through a stack of paper. The front of my mind seems to push against my skull as if swelling. I do not look up; if I catch Mary’s gaze, and see her eyes brimming with a melancholy and sacrifice I see in my mother, which my living feels indebted to, I may burst the church’s beaming silence and begin wailing. My mother was raised Christian, casually—her mother devout despite her mental illness, her father atheistic and a worshipper of Education. So too is my father, a teacher, and so too was I: raised to devote myself to rational thought, to embrace the logic of incremental achievement, to be the answerer of my own prayers. I am here in Moissac through my old and wise and prestigious university, the highest echelon of the increments I began climbing as a child—yet here I am in L’abbeye crying, hiding my urge to scream up to Mary, scream up to God.
I do not know if this is prayer, but I am moved by you, Mary. You are listening to this woman in front of me, who lit a candle for you, and I am sorry I have no coins for you, but I wish for you to hear me too; is this what meaning, what certainty, what knowing you are unconditionally loved feels like? I did not realize that the seed Ames and Gilead planted was already germinating. I did not realize that, by thinking loudly, I was already praying. I did not realize that He can hear me no matter how loudly I think. I did not, and still do not, know if I believe any of it. But I am certain that, there in L’abbeye Saint-Pierre, the first sprout burst up from dark sunlit soil. Now, soon, I hope to gather the courage to help it grow.
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
