Portland Magazine
June 9, 2020
This is what it means to pray these days.
By D.L. Mayfield
A FEW DAYS AGO a neighbor gave my husband and son a brown paper bag full of cherries. Her tree sits outside the small gates that surround her yard. As the school year neared its end, we would walk past—the mothers and the children—and look up at the branches heavy with bright orange and red cherries, not quite ripe enough yet.
My husband happened to be walking by at a lucky moment, and this neighbor, an older woman, offered my husband the bag. When he came home and gave it to me, I frowned. What about everybody else? Why should I accept a gift when there are so many others in the neighborhood who would love to feast?
This morning I took the cherries and pitted them, one by one. I was listening to The Brothers Karamazov on audiobook. It’s a book about loving your family and loving your neighbor with all of your crooked little heart. It might also be a little bit about being angry at God and wondering at the mess of a world God left for us to muddle through. As I listened, I mixed the cherries with sugar and lemon zest and topped them with a lumpy, runny batter. I knew that later we would eat a dessert we did not dream of, one that we did not earn.
I walk around my neighborhood and take notes inside my head. The neighbors who live behind us seem to operate some sort of mechanic shop. There are so many balding, sweating, red-shouldered men. There used to be an old yellow Labrador who wandered around, but I never see him anymore. I wonder if he died. There’s a black truck that has been parked there for ages, the faint scrawls of a Confederate flag visible on the rear window with soap or marker. Today there’s a new car in the yard, a white sedan with antennas sticking out of the top. In a previous life it had obviously been a police car. The front window has a bullet hole and attendant spider webs of cracks spinning outward. The back windshield has been shot to pieces, glass still scattered over the back seat. When I walked my kids past the house to the elementary school to get the free summer lunch there, they didn’t say anything about the car. Children always notice so little and yet so much.
Another neighbor brought her kids over to play this afternoon. They woke my son up from his nap, and he was sweaty as he sat in my lap and started to get used to being awake. The kids ate watermelon outside until they were covered with sticky juice, and then the wasps started to chase them. My neighbor grew up in generational poverty in the United States, and she told me sad stories of her life. I let them flow over me like water, but some of it escapes into my blood. I know that at night I will turn over the stories I hear, over and over again. My neighbor is a better mother to her children than her mother was to her. She is a miracle if I choose to see it.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan (the smart one, who does not believe in God) tries to explain to his brother Alyosha (the good one, who longs to be a monk) that he cannot believe in God because the world is so full of suffering. He tells terrible story after terrible story. He is like me, someone who is forever collecting these snippets of suffering, trauma, and sadness. If you live in the right neighborhoods, if you read the right books, you will find more than you can bear. I imagine Ivan has that wounded look in his eye, that look I have seen in the faces of friends who were born in places like Syria or Somalia, friends who were born into poor and dysfunctional families in the United States, the faces of people who have visited, even for a brief while, the edges of the empire, where things are so obviously unwell. I have seen people look at me with something like desperation in their eyes. So much suffering. So many children discarded, used, and killed.
How could God allow this? I love these friends, just like I love Ivan. They ask the questions because they truly believe that if God exists, then God must be love. And if God is love, then God must also be a perpetual wound, a weeping mother, ever attendant at the funerals of those who die in disgrace and ignominy. If God is love, then God is obsessed with all of these sad stories too.
I asked my neighbor if she liked cherry cobbler, and she said she did. We ate it together on my couch as our children ran and played. She said she liked that it wasn’t overly sweet, that there was a tartness to it. She got up to leave. She was going away to another state and didn’t know whether she would return. I said I would pray for her. I thought about the famous line from indigenous Australian writer and activist Lilla Watson, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
I think about all the years of trying to save people, drowning in loneliness, disconnected from the love of God. Now, my eyes are trained toward growing in solidarity, in mutuality, in slowing down enough to listen and sit with— to be a witness to the work of God in a very broken world feels miraculous. Walking around my neighborhood, committing to seeing all my neighbors in all of their complexities and chaos and minor miracles. Sticking around long enough to see the blossoms turn into cherries, to walk the sidewalks long enough to have a bag thrust in our hand, to be safe enough for stories to pour out on our couch, to be there still when people come back from travels if they ever do at all.
This is what it means to pray these days: to watch the cherries slowly ripen and to listen to the stories of suffering big and small. To put down roots in order to see the seasons engage their miraculous rebirth continually, to lament that the world is not how it should be. The cherry cobbler was delicious, but it didn’t fix anything. Still, I savored it as best as I knew how. I’m learning to take the sweet moments as I get them, not knowing how long they’ll last.
Taken from The Myth of the American Dream by D.L. MAYFIELD. Copyright © 2020 by Danielle Mayfield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
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