Bedtime Prayers
By Shae Krispinsky
After Claudia Rankine
Our mother taught us one prayer, Now I lay me down to sleep, and our grandmother taught us another, Our father who art in Heaven. At home we formed a kneeling line, heads bowed and pressing into the white chenille bedspread, eyes closed, hands clasped, knuckles blanching. Amen, and then we went our separate ways. At grandmother’s house, she prayed over us, as though she didn’t trust us not to escape her blessing. Either way I found myself offering up my own prayers, more like wishes. I didn’t fully understand death yet, thought it was a disappearance and then a return, not three days later but fifty years, an arbitrary number, the largest I could fathom within the scope of a life. We had Christ within us but were not Christ, so we had to wait. Wanting, though. That I also didn’t understand but I didn’t question it. I couldn’t fall asleep without imagining all the riches my prayers would provide.
By middle school I had received Holy Communion and had been confirmed. I couldn’t tell you what being confirmed meant but I could recite the books of the Bible in order—Old Testament and New. I wore a delicate gold cross necklace. I said my bedtime prayers without prompting. Praying became my premier pastime. Dear Lord, I would begin and then beg for anything that would in the moment benefit me. Please let my feet stop growing. Please don’t ever let me bleed. Please let me win the Spelling Bee. Please let my volleyball team win the big gym class match. Ruthless, shameless was my asking. I won the Spelling Bee but not the match. My feet stopped growing but eventually I bled. Some might say that 50% is good odds. I would say 50% is an F.
Enter: The summer before high school, a perfect Pennsylvania day, the kind of day that would make you renounce God. Or at least it did, me. My mother and I were driving one of the back country roads in our neighborhood. We passed the soybean field and were approaching the red listing byre, cows huddled around their feeding trough. My mother let the sunroof open. I had my window down, the wind garroting me with my hair. How could anyone not believe that God made this? my mother asked and without thinking, I thought, How could anyone not believe that god is this? I knew without knowing that I believed my thought to be true. With that, a chasm formed between me and my parents.
My family’s denomination centered more around Jesus’s love and sacrifice than around eternal damnation, still I knew what happened to those who never asked Christ into their hearts. But what happened to someone like me, who had asked him into my heart, but then it was as though he had ghosted me? My family’s denomination was not one of Dark Nights of the Soul, so I didn’t know what to do on that summer day when God forsook me and blue sky and red maple stepped in to replace Him. I found myself praying, Please don’t let me go to Hell for this.
The next few years became sneaking across the state line with the boy who was my best friend’s ex, who would become my best friend, who would become my boyfriend, who would become my ex, to the Borders where he would purchase Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and I would purchase anything that could explain what I now was. The Tao Te Ching. The Bhagavad Gita. Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner. Even The Dharma Bums. It all felt—possible, not probable. A shoe a half-size too small. I thought I wanted to be honorable, wanted to honor something so I didn’t have to feel so alone. Or maybe I wanted something to blame. A random reading of the dictionary led me to pantheism. Literally: All is god. Proof in the spirals, the Golden Ratio. A belief and a name without a practice is like a dead tree standing erect in the yard until it crumbles under your gentlest touch. I needed something to do. I needed something to heed me.
In college, meeting my new boyfriend’s father for the first time, he asked me, apropos of nothing, if I were a Christian. No, I admitted: the first time I had spoken this truth aloud. Do you believe in God? he then asked. I knew he meant with a capital G and I meant with lowercase but the homonym allowed me the technicality to say yes without lying. Good, or I would have kicked you out of my house. Was this persecution? For renouncing the capital G and not for the things I was doing with his drunken son? I didn’t consider this question until years later. On more than one occasion I found myself praying, Please let me bleed.
I once admitted to my therapist that I didn’t think of myself as human but as blue light radiating, suffusing every nook of the cosmos. He took this as a good sign, the dissolution of ego. He looked like the bastard son of Andy Dick and Peter Tork from The Monkees. He suggested meditation but failed to explain the impossibility of silencing the mind’s ceaseless chatter. The point was to become aware of the chatter. Wasn’t that my problem, though? I was so aware. I got lost in the chatter for years. And even when, years later, I understood the meaning behind sitting there on my royal blue zafu inside the incense-scented temple, I still got lost in the chatter. One image always seemed to find me in that silent hall: This time I was not blue light but Inanna, hung rotting from a meat-hook. Like this, forty-five minutes could pass in a single breath. There was a lesson in hubris in the image but I’ve yet to learn it.
This was the muddy path I followed throughout my twenties and into my thirties. My friends could easily call themselves atheist or agnostic, no waffling, no wavering. If pressed, I would say I was spiritual, a cop-out answer. In my head, I considered myself a Buddhist Pagan, meaning I was aware of my Buddha nature but did not follow the Middle Way and took photographs of dead trees. I chanted Namu myōhō renge kyō and bought chunks of obsidian, which were supposed to repel negative thoughts, and blue sodalite, which were supposed to help focus my thoughts, boost my creativity, and make me a better writer. I went on a meditation retreat and did not speak for three days. I went on a fire walk, where I danced over burning coals and shards of broken glass. I tried to remember when Mabon was. I burned offerings to the moon. A practice without a belief behind it is like planting trees too close to the water main. You think you’re doing something beneficial, but it only causes problems in the end.
Now at 38, I am finally starting to believe in myself. I still can’t fall asleep at night without whispering to someone, asking for something, but now I address my highest self. Please let me feel peace. Please let me act kind. Amen to that.
Shae Krispinsky lives in Tampa, FL, where she fronts the band, Navin Avenue, whose sound she describes as Southern Gothic 70s-arena indie rock with a pop Americana twist. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Connotation Press, Thought Catalog, The Dillydoun Review, Vending Machine Press, Sybil Journal and more. She is currently working on her band's second album and a novel.
