Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for July 25th

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Some Tips on Prayer

I want to share with you again two vignettes from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. We're in an ice-cream parlor in 1916. Francie Nolan has graduated from elementary school. She lives in a tenement district where people struggle everyday with belligerence in the streets, poor paying jobs interrupted by lay-offs, ethnic insults and little hope. No one could possibly comprehend the stress locked within the flats enclosed within those ugly neighborhoods. Francie's mother Katie actually kept surplus pennies and dimes in a piggy bank to forestall any unexpected costs of family survival. Indeed, Katie had learned to take a hard-nosed approach to life. No flights of fancy for her. Reality was a grind and the only way to deal with it was to get tough, pinch pennies and raise her kids to avoid the romantic bent of their father who lived in a world of "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" and other sentimental ballads. He drank as well, which led to his ultimate escape from reality - a premature death at 36.

But now here they were in this ice-cream parlor - Katie, Francie, her brother Neeley and Aunts Sissy (10 miscarriages) and Evy - to celebrate Francie's graduation. The waiter placed down the check for 30 cents and Evy thought, "I hope she's not fool enough to tip him." And Neeley thought, "Does mama know you're supposed to leave a nickel tip?" Katie had only a 50 cent coin in her purse, so she laid it on the check. "The waiter took it away and brought back four nickels . . . He hovered nearby waiting for Katie to pick up three of them. She looked at the four nickels. 'Four loaves of bread,' she thought. Four pairs of eyes watched Katie's hand. Katie never hesitated once she put her hand on the money. With a sure gesture, she pushed the four nickels toward the waiter. 'Keep the change,' she said grandly." Francie wanted to stand up and cheer!

And now it's midnight of New Year's Eve, 1917. Francie throws open the window of their top floor flat. " All was still . . . dark and brooding. As they stood at the window, they heard the joyous peal of a church bell. Then other bell sounds tumbled over the first pealing. Whistles came in. A siren shrieked . . . Tin horns were added." Then someone began 'Auld Lang Syne' and the Irish joined in - but only to be out sung by the neighborhood Germans singing 'Ach, du shoenes Gartenhaus'." Soon there were catcalls. The moment degenerated into insults. The Jews and Italians withdrew behind their blinds leaving the fight to the Germans and the Irish. At last all settled down. Once more the night was quiet. And then Francie grabbed her mother and Neeley. 'All together now," she ordered. The three of them leaned out the window and shouted, ' Happy New Year, everybody!'"

There are several such interludes in Betty Smith's story that amount to moments of breakthrough, of spontaneously imaginative behavior, of sudden generosity that relieve the bleakness of human existence - that encourage us to realize there's more to life than hopeless struggle; that goodness exists and is ever ready to emerge to challenge violence and skepticism or escapism as our only way of dealing with things. Too often we think of prayer as a petition for something specific: the recovery of health, a safe journey, a successful job interview. But I like to think that when Jesus says, "Seek and you will find," he's referring to that lifelong prayer that lurks deep within us: 'Dear God, what's it all about?" And note, he says, "Seek and you WILL find." And what shall we find? I've just given you two instances of it. We shall find that life is all about grace, about a divine generosity buried within our breasts which, if released even in the simplest of ways, can transfigure a neighborhood, transfigure a world. Indeed, you and I - ourselves - could begin to be an answer to our own and the prayers of the whole world - if, for instance, we had the guts like Katie - occasionally - to leave a sixty-six percent tip!

-- Geoff Wood