Words Without Songs

Words Without Songs Part V

Where I once was early in bed and up before the sun to pray, now I sit up late disinclined to sleep and lie in bed not wanting to get up.  Because of this I have not been getting to daily Mass, but I hope to get myself there, preferably starting tomorrow.  I set it as a goal.

 I have a habit of walking up and down as I pray but the floor creaks so alarmingly here, it distracts me.  I feel, quite frankly, as though God and I had never been an item.

 This is all very discouraging.

~~~

The church downtown works nicely for me for daily Mass.  I can go and just make it to work by nine. It is the church, the significant church, to which I used to go on my lunch hour as a young woman just out of community college and on my first job.  Much has changed: no more kneeling at the altar rail, nearly twenty years later!  Yet I felt at home, more so than in the parish in which I now live.

 I am ashamed that I have not been able to pray.  The reading today says that the Father did not desert Jesus because Jesus always did what pleased the Father.  I haven’t always done what pleases You, so how can I complain if You do desert me.  But I know it is I who have deserted You.

 I promised!  I will not curse you, even if you slay me.  I know I just don’t understand everything right now.

~~~

I read an article in the paper a few days ago about a headless rooster.  Really.  Evidently there was once a rooster that survived being beheaded and continued to live for some time as a headless curiosity.  It went about all its usual activities except that it couldn’t crow, of course.

 I feel in a bit of the same situation.  I go about my usual activities but I am not exactly my usual self.  Since I am around all new people who don’t know me, it is only evident to me. 

 I am really dragging myself around trying to act normally.

~~~

Palm Sunday has come and gone and I have started my second week of work.  I am surprised and dismayed to find how far Lent has gone on without me.  I barely pray, if I do pray, and my prayer journal which I kept so faithfully for all these years, has had no entries lately. 

 The place where I feel most at peace these days is not in church but in the train station.  I try to at least think about prayer when I am waiting for the train and riding back and forth.  Sometimes if I take a break at lunch, I walk over to the train station and walk up and down.

 Because I horrify myself with my coldness, I tried to focus on Palm Sunday, once I realized that it really was Palm Sunday.  I never knew what it meant to be disgusted by prayer.  I thought I knew.  I have been bored with prayer, I have been reluctant to pray, but I had no idea how much worse it could get.  I listened to the Passion narrative and had to keep reminding myself of all that this has meant to me in the past.  I heard the priest, reading the part of Jesus, say, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  Later I thought about this.  Maybe I have been afraid to really say this to You.  In my usual way I try to be polite and inoffensive. 

~~~

   I keep thinking of that headless rooster.  I smile at people, I act concerned, I try to care, I even run around like a, well, a headless rooster, running my little errands, but something is just not there.

~~~

Even in the subway, I walk around feeling like a simulacrum.  I wonder sometimes if I continue to have an objective reality or if I am visible to others.  Last night I went to donate blood and I failed to fill the bag.  Strange, the nurse said.  I don’t even have blood anymore, it seems.  Then, I was supposed to get my 8-gallon pin (I have spent eighteen years competing with my late father, who got a ten-gallon pin) but the lady went away with the slip but never gave me the pin.  I didn’t even get my juice.  I wonder if I am really here at all.