Prayer Body

Awakening to a new way of seeing.

I whisper a small prayer as I drive north, something I haven’t done in over a decade. I am not the praying kind. Running, I’ve said for the past few years is my prayer, a moving meditation. My run today is a 17-mile route in New Hampshire’s White Mountains that will take me up four peaks along Crawford Path, one of the oldest continuously maintained hiking paths in the US. But to complete the loop I’ll have to hoof it four miles down a mountain road to get back to my car after descending the final peak.

I’ve been on these trails dozens of times. I know the gear I need for the White Mountains, famous for their dangerous weather, know that dozens of hikers die here every year, most unprepared and pushing through weather they have no business pushing through. A young woman died alone on the ridge last year, disoriented, dehydrated. But it’s a perfect day, cloudless and low wind. The fairest of fair weather. I may not need the rain pants and jacket, emergency blanket stashed in my running pack, but I have them anyway. Nerves maybe. Wisdom, more likely. The weather here is unpredictable, I’ve been caught in hail on a summer day that was forecasted to be cloudless.

I change my plan as I drive up into the mountains, the rising sun casting a slant glow through the passenger window. Instead of trekking to my car at the end of the run, I’ll put the unpleasant bit at the beginning. I’ll start with four miles of road running, a warmup, before I start the climb to the ridge. I text my husband my route, arrow emojis between the name of each trail. Directions for how to find me in case something happens.

As I drive my mind wanders to the catastrophic as it often does. I think of all the ways in which I could be injured, a trip that slices a knee open, breaks a wrist. Or like my son did just weeks earlier, I could slip on a slick granite boulder and chip a tooth exposing the nerve. So much could go wrong and I am alone. The only thing I’m scared of in the woods is injury, it’s different once I leave them, find myself alone in trail head parking lots, running down remote mountain roads. Women running alone are often blamed for what befalls them. I’ve run so many miles alone sometimes I’m surprised I’m not a statistic too.

Lord, have mercy, I pray to push out the catastrophic thoughts. I petition my guardian angels for protection against accident and injury. This is new for me, well, not entirely new. Praying is something I was taught to do as a child but abandoned two decades ago when the one prayer I desperately wanted to be answered, prayed without ceasing, was never answered. It wasn’t a trivial prayer, for me it was life and death: I was struggling with anorexia and bulimia. At one time starving myself to inconceivable thinness then stuffing myself beyond comfort and forcing myself to purge. My metabolism, my blood sugar, my heart rate, my electrolyte balance, the disappearing enamel on my teeth–everything indicated that if I kept going, I’d die. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t even want the eating disorder but felt powerless against its addictive pull. I couldn’t stop and prayer wasn’t helping. It was easy to abandon a God who didn’t seem to be listening. Which is why praying for safety on a run is so foreign. A year ago, I would have scoffed at the idea. Thoughts and prayers, how pointless. But now as I pray I actually believe it will be answered. Lord, have mercy.

*

My son, almost a teenager now, was born at 6 pm on a Saturday in late September. By 7 pm we knew he had a congenital birth defect. It wasn’t life threatening, but would require surgery to reduce his risk of cancer later in life. His first surgery was at four months old. I can still remember refusing to feed him in the 24 hours beforehand. He had to go into anesthesia with an empty stomach. Something a four-month-old baby doesn’t understand. I knew what it meant to feel the painful claws of hunger scrape your insides. For him it was likely scary. For me it had been a sign of success. The emptier I felt the better. But by the time he was born I’d learned to feed myself. Becoming a mother taught me how to be full. Pregnancy pulled me from my disordered head back into a body in desperate need of healing. The disorder sloughed off me like an old skin and I was free.

My husband, scrubbed up and draped in a sterile gown just so he could hold our son to the last possible moment, walked him back into the surgery. I held back tears. Please, let him be OK, was the prayer I whispered.

They inserted tissue expanders beneath the skin on his back which we would slowly inflate with saline one day at a time. In four months, they would use the extra skin to cover the hole left when they excised the dinner-plate-sized circle of skin on his back that held pre-cancerous cells.

After his second surgery he appeared to be healing well, the incision that ran from armpit to armpit across his tiny back, scabbing over. But six weeks post-op while I was nursing him in the middle of the night, his skin flushed, his whole body warm. He pushed me away and began screaming. My hand brushed his back where the incision was. It was hot to the touch. We raced through our town, my husband running red lights, my son clutched to my chest in the front seat. We didn’t dare strap his feverish body into the carseat, pressing his painful back against the thin padding.

The incision was infected we learned before they put us on an ambulance transport and we raced through the growing light of morning north towards the children’s hospital. Sitting upright in the back of the ambulance, my head nodded and jerked, sleep licking at my consciousness. I thought of sepsis. I thought of his tiny body being overrun with MRSA. I thought of his death. I pleaded with God: If you answer one prayer in my lifetime, let it be this: please let my son live. I don’t care that you didn’t rescue me from an eating disorder. Just let my son live.

*

I park my car in the trail head lot, lace up my trail shoes, slide on my pack stuffed with soft flasks of water, applesauce packs and Nerd Gummy Clusters I can’t wait to eat, and start running down the mountain road. A mile in, I pass an orange road work sign that reads, “Road Closed.” I have no idea what lies ahead. How closed is the road? Closed to just cars or foot traffic too? I wonder if I’ll be turned around, sent back the way I’ve come, miles wasted and still nowhere near the ridge. What will I do then? There’s no cell service, no way to send my husband a new text with new arrows and trail names. Lord have mercy, I pray. When a mile later a dump truck comes into view with a crew of men standing nearby, I slow. Calculating my safety, petitioning my intuition for a signal. There are four men. I am the lone woman. Should I turn myself around? If they have any malicious intent, I’m outnumbered. Deep in the woods, no one will hear me scream. Lord, have mercy.

My intuition is quiet, adrenaline quickens my pace as I approach. I call good morning and slide past them. They don’t stop me and I run on, exhaling the breath I didn’t know I was holding. Another mile down the road I can see a front end loader, a “digger” my son used to call them. It’s straddling the road, raking a trough for the new aluminum culvert that’s lying in the dirt. The air is filled with the smell of overturned earth, leaves from a hundred falls ago, roots snapped open and weeping sap. The operator stops as I approach, gives a wave and lets me pass by on the small slice of road he has yet to touch with the teeth of the bucket. My feet quicken over the pavement as I pass by the newly dug ditch, grateful he didn’t stop me, grateful I didn’t have to swing wide into the woods thick with poison ivy. I sail past, lighter, like fear was tucked in the extra pockets of my pack, now discarded on the side of the mountain road. Lord, have mercy.

*

I know exactly when I decided to consider my unanswered prayers answered. I was standing in church–another entirely new thing for me–with my son. The rest of the family home, sick. The Eastern Orthodox Church was an entirely different experience from the Evangelical faith tradition I’d grown up with. My husband was the first to go back to church after we’d spent a decade deconstructing our faith and declaring our disbelief. I didn’t initially want to go back, but as I’d reluctantly accompanied my husband and children, I began to feel a pull to be there. Curiosity more than anything: what will this God I’ve rejected do? It’s the same curiosity that leads me into the mountains: what will this body that I once rejected do?

My son stood next to me, about to turn twelve, enough years to feel like his surgeries were a lifetime ago. I put my arm around him, a small hug, the kind of touch I craved as a child. I often pull my children’s bodies to me, memorizing the feel of them in my arms, to give them what I don’t remember having. He smiled up at me. My hand fell away and we returned our gaze to the altar, behind it: the icon of Christ inside his mother. Mary in gilded mosaic dominates the church. Mother and child. Child in mother. Lining the walls are more icons, saints both male and female. When we arrive at church we venerate the icons, we cross ourselves, we kiss them, we bow slightly. Whenever the Trinity or the Mother of God are mentioned during liturgy we cross ourselves again and again. Later, we prostrate, kneeling on the purple carpet and bowing fully, Child’s Pose. Untouched by Enlightenment thinking that made reason supreme, Eastern Orthodox Christianity integrates the body and is open to mystery. Belief isn’t just conjured in the mind, it is practiced physically. Everything about this new faith is embodied, it has brought my understanding of God from my head into my body.

Standing there with my son, I remember that he lived. His life, his presence next to me are the answer to that prayer I prayed in the back of the ambulance. Yes, it was also the doctors and the life-saving medication, but perhaps it was also my prayer and the hand of God interceding on my son’s behalf. A mercy that the interventions worked. A mercy the MRSA didn’t overrun his body. Lord, have mercy.

I spent so much time focusing on the single unanswered prayer of my own struggle, my eating disorder, that I had neglected to see the answered prayers. And even then, hadn’t that prayer too been answered? Hadn’t I also lived? It has been sixteen years since I’ve engaged in any kind of disordered behavior. Sixteen years of sobriety from bingeing and purging and restricting.

*

I climb and climb, half running, half hiking to the summit of the first peak. Once I’m there, the mountains fall away and I’m as close to the sky as I can get. I sail across the granite ridge, the wind, breath of the divine, licking at my ponytail sending wisps in swirls around my face. I am alive. My body so strong and capable. I am high on the thrill of the unbroken views, the roll of green and granite mountains as far as the eye can see into Vermont and Maine. This is the original church. Eden. A sanctuary of golden light, veins of quartz and mica in a floor of gray, walls verdant, pulsing in the wind, a dome of endless blue. The day feels like a gift. Lord, have mercy.

On the descent I’m careful with my feet, out of practice with technical terrain. I look like an awkward toddler learning to walk, unsteady and ready to fall at any moment. I don’t want to fall, chip a tooth, break a wrist, roll an ankle. I want my body to be whole and not broken. I know what a broken body feels like, hollowed out, discarded, lost. Lord have mercy. I bobble for a moment on a loose lichen-covered boulder. A surge of gratitude. I didn’t fall. I roll both ankles, but miraculously they bounce back. I love my capable body the way it is strong and durable for adventures like this. Later, below treeline, my stride catches on the stub of a sapling. I trip and pitch forward, my momentum carrying me through the air. My foot finds the dirt, I grab hold of a young Hemlock. I am upright, as stunned to have not fallen as if I had. A save. A lucky break. Lord, have mercy.

When I’m finally back at my car, seventeen miles later and nearly five thousand feet in elevation gain, I think of all the little mercies. I count six of them. Six almost disasters. Six risky moments that turned out just fine. Six answered prayers. This is how I think now. I look for all the answered prayers. My new attitude towards prayer feels like the difference between comparison and gratitude. Comparison always looks for what is lacking. Gratitude celebrates what is. It helps me see how much I have instead of what I do not have. The hallmark of the first few decades of my life was comparison. Comparing myself to the rake thin models in glossy magazines. Comparing numbers on a scale. Comparing calories in the foods I could and could not eat. But now I am noticing. My attention shifted to the mercy in everyday moments. Is it luck? Mercy? The goodness of my own body. Or God?