Arranger of Prayers

Essay Published in Issue 1 of DOMA, the literary journal of Fulbright Bulgaria.

It is this look askance that seems to resonate with me. Perhaps it was not her perspective of me that I experienced but my own view of myself through her eyes. It is I who looked askance at months behind and more months ahead of trying to pray, looked askance at faith thrown into shadow. It was I who was displeased with my prayers and my missed genuflections, however foreign they were to my cultural background. My own thin life was the length of a candlewick in comparison to the history of the Faith. My personal faith was relit repeatedly by another flame: blown out at the slightest wind but relit yet again against—as it sometimes felt—my conscious will. I needed a baba, a translator to me and for me, someone to take my gestures toward God, make weak words and gestures into more than I had the strength to offer.

I left my prayer in her hands, trusting she would know when it was finished.