On Prayer

When a former grad student who attends
the same church in your parish mentions 
he hasn't seen you lately on Sundays, you say 
after three years of pandemic isolation and 
the resulting germaphobia, plus the heaviness
of each day in the world, it's just harder to come 
back. For lesser sins (like eating breakfast before 
mass yet taking communion anyway, then chewing 
the body of Christ), you used to be afraid your soul 
would char in the eternal barbecue of hell, or languish 
in the triage station called purgatory, someday to be 
extracted like a dented plush toy out of a claw machine, 
but only after the right number of prayers for your 
salvation are dropped into the coin slot by people 
you don't even know. So now, maybe you're only a little 
surprised at how matter-of-fact you feel: it is what it is. 
In Sunday school, the nuns used to say, imagine 
your soul after baptism: a luminous white, like new-
fallen snow across an entire city. No surface runoff, 
no dust, grime, or mud; not even the herringbone 
tracks left by birds nor the flower-petal prints 
of light-stepping foxes. But snow melts, rain falls, 
swells into flood. Houses and bridges go under. 
In autumn, your mother dies; then a friend, 
and a friend of that friend. Fires rage, bombs 
fall; wars never seem to end. You can't imagine
how many prayers are sobbed at each site of ruin
or howled into the cold, clear naves of night.