Summary
A man raised as a Baptist describes what prayer has meant to him throughout his childhood and adult life. He continues to pray regularly even though he is not sure he believes in God. On three occasions he believes he heard God speaking directly to him.
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Extract
Half-Answered Prayers.
When I was a child, I longed to hear the voice of God. I prayed and prayed, begging to be heard, begging to be answered. I prayed not to die. I prayed that I wouldn't be whipped for kicking my brother. And I prayed to get things I wanted. A dog. A Cub Scout uniform. A baseball glove. A radio.
In bed at night, I spent uncountable hours in an almost mindless orgy of greed, pleading and whining for a transistor radio. Every night for months, I troubled "deaf heaven with my bootless cries," as Shakespeare phrases it. I wanted the radio so I could huddle beneath the covers after I was sent to bed, and listen to baseball games and country music. Even then, years before I could envision terminal cancer patients praying frantically for a miracle cure and years before I read of Jews in Nazi death camps beseeching God for justice, I knew that asking for a radio, a thing, was ignoble--a vulgar abuse of my Protestant fight to address the godhead directly. But I wanted the radio so much I persisted in my supplication. Though I've never doubted that the impulse behind the two was pretty much the same, my childhood avarice, over time, changed into spiritual longing. In either case, I've wanted something I didn't have--whether it was a radio when I was ten, world peace when I was twenty, homes for the homeless when I was thirty, a job that offered personal fulfillment when I was forty, or spiritual serenity as I near fifty. I now scorn my youthful avarice and materialism, but at least, after months of bootless crying, I got the radio. That answered prayer may have owed more to my earthly father's growing fired of my badgering than to my heavenly father's finally extending his grace. Or perhaps, as I was taught to think at church, my father was God's agent on earth. However I came by the radio, I was not allowed to take it to bed with me. My mother said, "Your bed is for ...See the full content of this document
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