Praying for a Miracle, Praying for Absolution

by Shannon Frost Greenstein

 Dennis Zhang

Hail Mary, Mother of Grace, the Lord is with thee…

I skip that one.

St. Francis, please, help me…

I skip that one, too.

Please, God, don’t let him find out…

That one piques my interest.

I exhale, a puff of air between pursed lips like a tsunami of air, the flame blinking out and a meandering ribbon of smoke ascending toward the ceiling. Toward God.

It gets a little darker; colder.

I reach out, pluck the stout, waxy column from its glass prison, and wince as a drop of hot wax falls onto my thumb.

I’m sorry God, please, please, I’m sorry…don’t let him find out.

I hold the candle to my nose, inhaling the woman’s desperation. She’d had an affair, and her husband was catching on, and she was afraid she was going to lose the children.

Typical.

The late afternoon sun pours through stained glass, piercing me with shards of color which illuminate me from within and shine out from my very skin.

It is deathly quiet in the Basilica, a few souls kneeling before the altar clutching their rosaries, obedience made incarnate. The sounds of Philadelphia echo outside, but subdued; like even Ubers and angry pedestrians and the pervasive wailing of a rapidly-shifting climate dare not intrude on this sanctity.

I examine the candle, now cool, now benign; no trace remains of a panicked young woman, falling back on the security blanket of an all-loving deity, frantic enough to drop two dollars into a wooden box and strike a match, strike it to produce fire and then spread that fire outward, wick burning her wish up to Heaven, frantic enough to think any of that would work.

I replace it, exactly the same, but wish-less; miracle-less. Her prayer was between her and God, and despite that exclusivity, or because of it, now will never be heard. Or answered.

Nietzsche said God is dead. But that’s not right. God is there, and He’s listening. But sometimes, He just doesn’t care. And sometimes, prayers don’t always make it up to Heaven. And sometimes, there are forces in play down here on Earth.

Like me.

Her fingerprints on the candle are smudged now from the oils on my hands, but still her plaintive yearning rings in my ears and around my cerebrum.

Please don’t let him find out.

Bored by now, her not knowing God will never hear her prayer, I run my hands across the row of votives, always burning. Always someone wishing. Always someone hoping for a miracle. Always someone in trouble, in need, cold, hungry, sick, dying, lonely, scared. Always voices in the din calling out to God, and always me, trapping them, catching the voices of the troubled, the cold, the hungry, sick, dying, lonely, scared on their way to where they’re going and making sure they go no further than me.

Why?

Well, if He doesn’t answer my prayers, why should anyone else get an answer to their own? If I have fallen to my knees before God, stood strong against the devil’s temptations, screamed in misery to the sky for Him to hear me, if I have done all that and STILL heard nothing but silence…then why does anyone else deserve a miracle?

Please…

Don’t…

Why…

Our Father…

The prayers run under my fingertips, the prints of their owners leaving behind a script I can read clearly, the swan song of unacknowledged dreams.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Unborn, please take this child into your loving arms at the feet of our Heavenly Father. Please, please, I can’t have this baby.

This could be interesting.

I rest my thumb against the candle, barely touching its surface, and feel the weight of this desire course through my limbs and fill my fingers and toes and echo deep within my teeth where I usually feel the bass line in rock songs and my pulse when I run.

Please, God, I can’t. Forgive me, and I’m sorry.

I get a mental picture of her from her fingerprints, a young woman, unmarried, of course, and barely making ends meet. Her clothes are ratty, her car is always breaking down and she cannot rise above the lifetime of trauma that has kept her so downtrodden.

Deep down, in the part of me that once lost everything while God laughed, I can almost feel empathy for her. I can almost understand her panic and her fear, but that part of me is quiet now and empathy is dead.

I lean forward and blow out the candle, extinguishing the light, extinguishing the warmth, extinguishing the prayer. I can almost hear her sigh as the smoke drifts toward the ceiling, the sound of her certainty in God’s existence being wheezed out along with the flame.

Looks like someone’s having a baby.

***

I’m not sure how long I kneel, reading wishes, eavesdropping on prayers, ensuring that people’s greatest desires will never reach anyone’s ear, omnipotent or otherwise.

Misery loves company.

I lose time, sometimes, listening to the fingerprints. Sometimes I wipe out the dreams of entire congregation’s worth of worshippers; sometimes I pick just a few, just a few to really piss off God, the most desperate prayers of the meek who need a miracle the most.

Once I blew out a candle lit by a single father in his twenties, swearing he’d realize his dream of the seminary and priesthood if God would only cure his only daughter of leukemia. Blowing that one out felt good. It felt like vengeance, from one man who had everything taken away against another one, against the God that has abandoned us both.

I sense movement behind me and remove my hand, lest anyone see me plucking wishes from the well. An older man, someone pious, someone devout, someone damned anyway, approaches the altar, steadies himself against the balustrade, and drops to his knees on the cheap green velour cushion.

I nonchalantly rest my fingertips upon the wood of the rail, feeling the vibrations pulsing through every fiber of the grain. I hear the inner monologue of every person who has ever touched this banister and left a print; I hear the voice of the tree itself. I hear the man’s thoughts. I have his headache.

I swear to God, when she wakes up…

I startle at the venom in the prayer, my teeth closing involuntarily on my tongue. This man is enraged; anger is radiating from his very psyche through his hands, tightly clutching the balustrade, his knuckles white, even his fingerprints infuriated, which I read through the white noise of the wooden rail’s past lives, when it housed baby birds and cried red leaves in the fall and was felled, finally, by a chainsaw and man’s short-sightedness.

I will burn that house to the ground, I swear I will…

This caricature of Christianity, this refined gentleman, looking every inch the successful professional and god-fearing lamb, means exactly what he says; I understand that intrinsically. There is indeed a woman, and there is indeed a house, and if she wakes up, he will burn them both to the ground, and I have no more reason to doubt this than I do reason to suspect God answers prayers at all.

The man, his jaw clenched, reaches out a hand and plucks a votive from the pile. He grabs a match, pinches it between his finger, flicks it alight with his thumbnail in a near-unimaginable show of manliness and manual dexterity that his polo shirt and shined shoes belie.

He lights the candle, the alcove infinitesimally brighter with the added illumination, and shakes out the match. The pungent stench of sulfur fills the air, like hellfire, like a Revelation.

As quickly as he has come, the man rises to his feet and exits the periphery of my vision, the receding echo of his footprints sounding like a dying heartbeat. I hear the towering oak doors with the giant bronze knockers open, then shut, and he is gone.

Quiet again, and I edge over to the newest candle in the chorus of light, resting a single finger against the gummy wax.

A shriek as loud as a siren fills my head, and I see her, his wife, probably, unconscious, bleeding, supine on a bed that is soon to go up in flames. Images flood my nervous system and bounce around, relentlessly, like a million tennis balls hit, again and again, against the walls of my skull: A fight, yelling, pervasive terror, the moment she was choked unconscious and a small child peeking around the bedroom door at the dreadfulness of it all.

Well, shit.

I feel a stirring, foreign, alien. It takes my breath away.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt anything but rage that I almost don’t recognize any other sentiment. And as I clutch the candle and see the eyes of the child, my mind flashes back, unbidden, to the children, my children, my family, the only thing that mattered, taken from me by a supposedly-omnibenevolent God, and I feel paternal, and I feel grief, and I feel sorrow, and I feel, suddenly, like a dam has broken, thousands of other things I can’t even identify.

Now what?

Is now, I ask myself, the moment it all turns around? Is now my chance to set things right, to balance the cosmic scales, to forgive God and ask for his forgiveness in turn? What if now is my last chance?

Emotion is filling me up like water in a bathtub, punctuated by flashes of the hatred at God I’ve never been able to let go. I feel uncertain; I feel lost. I feel alone.

I’ve been alone for what seems like forever, of course, since He took my wife and kids and house and job, but the ache of this loneliness is different. This is the loneliness of solitary, and this is the loneliness of being on your own in a foreign land, and this is the loneliness Cassandra felt after Apollo cursed her.

Is this the moment?

I stare, transfixed, at the flame. I try to dredge up a memory, of my children, of when I was last happy. I see the light, dancing, and understand in my lizard brain that, if given the chance, this tiny fire would burn out of control and eat everything in its path. I stare, and the flame merges with the fire in my mind’s eye, the fire that is probably about to be set and which might take the life of a child in addition to its mother.

Is this the moment?

Nope.

This candle, I leave. This prayer keeps shining right up to Heaven, a prayer to make things right and not get caught, but right is wrong; and I have no problem letting wrongs play out as they may. After all, if I’m in perdition, I don’t give much of a shit about the rest of the world getting there eventually, too.

Why, I’ve asked time and time again, have you forsaken me?

It took a while, but the answer struck me one day, out of nowhere. It is not that God has forsaken me; it’s that He doesn’t care enough not to. Back then, before, when He called me Job, I put everything on the line for Him; and, like any gambler down on his luck or with a crooked dealer, I lost it all.

And now?

Now, I leave that candle burning. It’s the least I can do, for revenge, for my family, for the love we shared that became a mockery, to pay back this debt I feel I am owed.

It’s not like I’m going anywhere at the end of the day. I’ve lurked in churches for millennia, chuckling inwardly as sermons praise my faith, plotting, blowing out candles, destroying fantasies and hope. And I’ll stay, too, until the debt is paid.

This is my penance.

Perdition. Because God isn’t dead…he’s just a sadist.

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Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Find her work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Chaleur Magazine, Crab Fat Magazine, Bone & Ink Lit Zine, and elsewhere. Follow her on twitter at @mrsgreenstein or on her website: shannonfrostgreenstein.wordpress.com.