"Franny and Zooey" as a Manual on Prayer.

I learned to pray from my parents.  They told me to bow my head and say certain words before eating and they taught me to say "Now I lay me down to sleep" before I went to bed.  I am trying to remember how I worked out who this "God" person was they were going on about or how I came to understood that I was meant to be talking to him (He was always "he" to the adults of my parents' generation). 

When I think about it, it seems to be something I've always known.  Though obviously, that can't be true.  At some point, the words would have just been words.

The blessing my father said at night went like this:  "Father, we thank thee for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.  In the name of Christ the Lord, Amen."  Where I grew up, it was sort of the universal adult blessing of the food. 

In school, we learned to say this: 

God is great
God is good
Let us thank him for this FOOD.
Ah-MEN!

This lent itself easily to schoolyard variations, e.g., "God is good; God is great; Help me get the biggest plate."  When a friend of mine said it instead of the real blessing, a little girl---my cousin Julie, I'm guessing---got very worked up.  That's how I learned the word "sacrilegious."

I don't think I know any other food blessings.  It's funny to think about how little these meant to me, ever.   Even during the periods when religion mattered to me--- and now, in my adult life---I never thought it was important to say a blessing.   

I still think that in a way, and yet shouldn't those of us who have food spend a few seconds each day before falling through feeling grateful to something (God, Fate, karma, whatever) that we happen to be among those who get to have some on a regular basis?

When I was a kid back in the Seventies, my friend had a Bill Cosby record where he talked about saying the standard prayer before bed and how the key line---IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE---used to keep him awake at night.  I used to worry a lot about dying as a child myself.   I wonder to this day how normal that was, particularly I had little concept of what it meant to die, except that if you were good you would "go to Heaven." 

I don't remember worrying that I would end up in what we had to call "the bad place" (we were never allowed to say "Hell"); I was just afraid, end of story.  I think I used to end the rote part of the prayer with a very intense prayer that I not die, followed by an equally intense bit where I listed all the other people I didn't think should die that night.  It was a pretty long list, as there were a few people who I was desperately afraid of losing, and a lot of people I felt I should be desperately afraid of losing. 

It got to be a sort of overwhelming compulsion for me.  I couldn't get to sleep till I'd said it.  Furthermore, while I'd been taught that I didn't need to say it aloud, I was convinced that it didn't count unless I squinched my eyes shut tight and clenched my jaw till it hurt.  It's as if I thought I had to forcibly ram myself into God's personal prayer socket.   

Looking back, I can't discover whether I felt any sort of response. I don't think I would have recognized it if I had.  It's funny: people get all sorts of religious training/indoctrination, but very little help in learning how to pray or in learning what to expect from prayer.   I certainly had the notion that it was to be used in three situations:  (1) At the table;  (2)  At church and in other public ceremonies (we had prayer in school long after it was no longer realy legal); and (3) When you really, really wanted something.   I did catch on pretty early that the answer is almost always,  "Nuh-uh."  I think I got the impression from that that I shouldn't ask for anything but really big things, such as for God to keep my parents alive. 

I didn't catch on till I was much older that prayer is meant to be about communication and  connectedness.  A big factor in my starting to understand this was J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, a high-impact short novel addressing Christian mysticism and the use of prayer as a method by which one can open the third eye and "get to see God."   I read it in high school, and again---with increasing understanding---in college.  I try to read it at at least once a year. 

The story is essentially a set of two dialogues concerning The Way of a Pilgrim,  an anonymous Russian work that had a profound impact on Franny and me.   (It's weird;  I'd have thought that book would have changed the way Americans of my religion think about religion, but everyone I know thinks of Catcher in the Rye when they think of Salinger, a book which deals with exactly the same subject much, much less directly).
 

I was also deeply impressed by Salinger's  short story, Teddy [click the link to read it yourself], in which the (very) remarkable little boy's moment of profound revelation occurred as he was watching his little sister drink milk.

[quote begins from "Teddy" by J.D. Salinger, published at www.freeweb]

Nicholson was looking at him, studying him. "I believe you said on that last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience. Is that right?"

"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean."

Nicholson didn't say anything.

[quote ends from "Teddy," by J.D. Salinger]

 

The parallel passage in Franny and Zooey appears in the "Zooey" section of the novel [separately published at the preceding links at www.freeweb]  occurs at the end of the novel.  I don't know how to explain what the novel is about without explaining what it is all about, but let's just say that Zooey, the older brother, is trying to help his younger sister through a period of despair into her own moment of enlightenment.  He achieves this by reminding her of a line that their dead elder brother, Seymour, used to use when they were scheduled to appear on the radio program of which they were the stars.  Here's the key passage, which I've thought about over and over since I first read it in high school, and which becomes more deeply poignant to me with every passing year.

[quote begins from J.D. Salinger, "Zooey", from Franny and Zooey, published at www.freeweb]

"I remember about the fifth time I ever went on 'Wise Child.' I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast--remember when he was in that cast? Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again--all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and--I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense"

Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. "He told me, too," she said into the phone. "He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once." She released one hand from the phone and placed it, very briefly, on the crown of her head, then went back to holding the phone with both hands. "I didn't ever picture her on a porch, but with very--you know--very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer, too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!"

"Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Let me tell you something now, buddy. . . . Are you listening?"

Franny, looking extremely tense, nodded.

"I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret--Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know--listen to me, now--don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."

For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

[quote  ends from "Zooey" by J.D. Salinger]

Neither made much sense to me when I was in college, but I was intrigued. It wasn't till I began to study Eastern religions that they began to make sense.  Now that I've had a lot of experience of my own, they strike me as the best reframing of the central themes of Christianity that I personally have ever encountered.   

My own illumination occurred over years rather than through a satori.  I didn't have much use for God in my twenties and I rather despised anyone who did.  But at thirty, I came here, "here" being 600 miles from anyone I knew.  Bad things happened to me here during those first few years, and I was alone for most of them.  I turned to "God"  even though I didn't believe in God because there really weren't a lot of options that were acceptable to me.   

I can't tell you the moment when religion started to be the main thing for me.  I remember my own utter astonishment when I realized that this was the case.   It didn't replace anything;  it didn't make me feel less lonely or terrified when my husband Don died, and it didn't pay the debts he surprised and shocked me by leaving behind him.   It's not a safety net or a shield or an online catalogue store. I made mistakes and did a lot of things that damaged me fundamentally.   It never stops me from feeling afraid or alleviates the grief and anger I feel when I contemplate certain losses and certain huge trunks of lost time. 

It's just a fact of my life now.  I remember desperately saying "the Jesus prayer" as redacted by Salinger in  Franny and Zooey in the hope that I would magically experience the effect being flooded with saving Christ-consciousness.  I said the prayer, and any number of other mantras and meditations and affirmations, and nothing happened at all...till suddenly it did.

It's almost as if I succeeded with that prayer:  that it somehow did become part of my pulse and heart till it rose up into my conscious mind.   One day, like the little boy in Teddy---though about three decades later for me than for him---I also saw God in the ordinary things around me and the experience was quite similar to his in many respects.  Afterwards nothing was changed but this:  I feel conscious every minute of my waking life---I don't know about the rest---of the presence of God.  Which of course means that afterwards, nothing was ever the same.

Much later after this development, I read the gospels, including the Gnostic gospels, and fell in love with Christ in the simplest and most final way.   I became obsessed with finding out anything I could about the man Christ, who he was, and how he lived.  Alas, there's so very little to know.  But I often try to imagine what he was really like; what he meant; what he thought really about the things that were going on around him:  the Roman occupation, Pontius Pilate, Herod, the "freedom fighters" such as the Sicarii referred to by the Romans referred to as "bandits" (lestai) and so forth.

But I still have trouble with prayer.  In some respects, I feel it's unnecessary;  I have a sense most of the time of connection to God, so I don't feel I have to say any particular words or take any particular action to make it happen.  In others, I feel it's wrong.  There's a part of me that's deeply reluctant to pray for anything; it just seems sort of presumptuous.   And so many people who pray seem to be so wrong that it just seems better to me to keep quiet as the Quakers do and let God do whatever God does, if anything.   

I thought of this tonight, when I have a lot on my mind that makes me feel pained and anxious.  I just lost an uncle and an aunt in the last three months;  Rumcove's mother died this last week; and now my mother has the flu.  It's perhaps nothing much, but talking to her worried me;  I don't want to lose her, am not ready, will never be ready.  I ask myself if it's right to pray, as I used to pray as a child, that my mother's health be restored?  I don't know if it's the right thing to ask, but it's what I want.  It's what I want to have happen.

I am not afraid of dying myself---I truly am not----but there are people I don't want to do without.  She is one of them.  As a religious person, I not only believe, I believe I know that death is nothing to fear for the person who dies; but what about those of us who get left behind, huh?  What about us?   

I am bemused by faith healers and pentecostalists who do miraculous healings but obsess over stem cells.  Why isn't using the Holy Spirit or the power of prayer or whatever it is to change what was going to happen just as much an unwarranted interference with the will of God?  None of it makes a lot of sense to me.  Actually, if you believe that the purpose of prayer is to get God to do things for you, NOTHING makes sense.  Seriously, think about it.  Consider the 2005 tsunami or 9-11.  Consider George Bush; consider Iraq; consider the Holocaust. 

If you think of prayer as a way of petitioning God to make changes to reality, it seems to me that you're thinking about it the wrong way.   It seems as if it ought to be presented as a way of coming to terms with reality and of channeling the love I think all normal human being sometimes feel for Life in the abstract and the world and one another.   For example, I often  pray when I'm petting my cat.  There's nothing else I can do with the love I feel for a furry feline who will almost certainly die before I will.   The cat isn't a safe repository;  the only safe place for it is with God.  And that's true for all earthly loves. 

Nevertheless, I prayed hard for my mother---eyes squinched, jaw clenched---but I didn't feel any better after I did it.  I believe (I think) that this sort of prayer is pointless.  I could ask that she be held in the light, as the Quakers say, and I could ask that I respond to whatever occurs in the right and best way for all concerned, but there's a part of me that is deeply resistant to the notion that you can pray someone back to health---or that you should. 

But I intend to give it my best Quaker-style efforts.   Even if the best I can do is the Jesus Prayer:  "Lord, Jesus Christ have mercy on me." 

Comments

[martina]

sorry, i'm italian and i'm searching a phrase in ''Franny and Zooey'' that Zooey says to his mother. It's where Zooey talk to mum and he says her that Seymour had made him and Franny 2 anormals and he says a prayer buddhist i think...can you help me? can you tell me the prayer? Thank you very much

[Viagra Online]

Thanks for this manual on prayer, very useful tips.

Elizabeth D.Taylor