Do you know that song? “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord/ standing in the need of prayer/ not my mother, not my father/ but it’s me, oh Lord/ standing in the need of prayer.”
As a child, I would sing different versions and arrangements of that song with no true understanding of the lyrics. I was no older than 7; the rote recitation was considered a sign of my intelligence and capabilities. I knew I was supposed to pray for others to be included in God’s favor, for their protection and wellness, et cetera. I knew I was supposed to pray over my food, because I was fortunate to have it. I was relatively healthy, as was my family, so what prayers did I need?
When I entered puberty, my prayers became focused on myself: please stop people from bullying me, please make my family kinder to me, please don’t let me wake up in the same circumstances day after day, please don’t let anyone find out about the ways I’d been “bad.” I felt guilty for being abused by a relative; my prayers were supposed to signal to God that I needed to be unburdened. It never happened. He didn’t swoop in and miraculously end it all. It didn’t happen the way everyone in school said it would. I was, yet again, weird and different in that way. I never felt the relief or release folks promised to me. I knew it wasn’t acceptable to speak to that, even in whispers.
It was God’s yellow light, as one of my 7th grade teachers would say. A yellow light meant “not yet,” while I was asking for an end to my 12-year-old suffering? I had to wait … to be safe, protected, and healed? I was “supposed” to go through this hell? For fucking what? A testimony before my schoolmates in chapel? I didn’t want the attention on me. I didn’t want to accidentally confess my abuse history to a room full of people who didn’t like, value, or respect me anyway. These performances of pain weren’t for me. I didn’t want to testify that I suffered and God brought me out. Because I wasn’t gonna come out of that until adulthood, when the people who hurt me couldn’t access me any longer. In my estimation, I didn’t need prayer. I needed love, support, and kindness. Not empty platitudes about God’s healing abilities that had nothing to do with me or my slowly dying grandmother, whose COPD was in early stages. I was being lied to. I was the only one who knew it. It wasn’t safe to say so.
By high school, I wasn’t praying anymore. I attended a Quaker school; our weekly meetings for worship were spent in meditative silence that sometimes led me to fall asleep. Other times, I reflected on what people said, or felt moved to speak myself. I still felt like an alien observer of humans. I only felt belonging when I sang with the gospel choir I co-founded. I needed something uniquely Black and accessible to my working class background in the midst of sweet sixteen BMWs, L.L. Bean backpacks, and field hockey intensive camps that cost more than my mother made in a month. I was not of this place, just a visitor for 4 years. I would later be sabotaged by a teacher who didn’t inform me of what I needed to graduate; no prayers could change the antiblackness and misogynoir woven into the school’s environment. In hindsight, because I did not “belong” there by so many standards, Now, it makes sense that the only person ringing alarm bells was my student advisor. He knew I was in trouble. He didn’t know the extent of it, and the school’s administrators were only marginally helpful. I was in the need of the rescue that prayer was supposed to grant me. It did not happen. I kind of tumbled out of the red doors of that main building in June of 1998, and thought I might die before I made it to college.
I didn’t even try to pray again until I was about 25. From a close friend, I learned to ask my ancestors for guidance and favor. A new apartment, a new job, a loan, opportunities to change my lot in life. It worked, as long as I worked, because faith without works is dead. Prayer became my extra work, my cherry on top, when I labored to the point that I could no longer. Still, the weight of my mental illness and lack of fulfillment weren’t moved by prayer. Even when I asked my spirits to help me.
I did not understand until I was in my mid thirties that I needed concrete and tactile help. I needed therapy, and a support network. As I gathered these things for myself, my relationship to prayer changed yet again. I prayed to say “thank you” to my dead, and to ask them to guide me to my highest good. I prayed for shelter, I prayed that my loved ones far and wide be protected and have joy in the face of trouble. I learned, eventually, to envision prayer as the beginning of a plan. It is an intention setting practice: I want to love and be loved well. How do I do that? What practices do I engage, and how do I adapt that intention to changing circumstances?
As I enter and explore my forties, I have learned to ask for prayer on my behalf. from any and all willing parties. I have learned to receive, not just well wishes, but the outpouring of love and intention from those who consider me. The prayers, and the sweetness they bring, give me assurance that I am seen by and belong to people who mean what they say to and about me. I no longer feel out of step when I say, “I feel unheard.” I am affirmed where I am, not chastised for failing to have faith.
Now, when I stand in the need of prayer, I am uplifted. This is my harvest, from my faith the size of a mustard seed.