Who Do You Pray To? - Cynthia Poten

[Larry Robinson]

Who Do You Pray To?

Who do you pray to, my granddaughter asked
some years after I stopped trying to insert
a moment of gratitude into family meals.
 
Not that we said grace when her father was a boy. 
It took years of love betrayed and single motherhood
to remember giving thanks for our daily bread.
 
My parents neither prayed nor went to church;
but when I was ten, her age when she asked this,
we had a boarder who said Grace at our meals.
 
He said the same words each time …
We thank you Lord for this food we partake of,
and we ask that you bless it to our nourishment.
 
Though I bowed my head because I had to
(my mother insisted we honor Mr. Perkins prayer),
after some weeks his words instilled a pathway
 
in my mind, led me to ponder food as a gift
from Someone who blessed it when asked.
But when our boarder moved on, grace did too.
 
Years later the pause of gratitude returned --
a response to musings on the Gift of Life,
the Sacred Harmonies, the Great Mystery
 
I didn’t know what to tell my granddaughter
that day, how to convey my sense of the Holy
that touches each of us in its own way.
 
I explained I was thanking the rice and the green
beans, the sunlight and soil that made them grow
and all the hands that brought food to our table.
 
Eight years have passed. She still wants to know
who I pray to, as she grapples with the Gordian Knot
of inequities, fires and floods that frame her future.
  
I tell her we are the Mystery’s foundlings now,
cast from a forge of human purpose so out of  
sync with Creation, we’ve unleashed the Furies,
 
who sweep us up with the remnant wild into nets
of greed and lies, where we all crowd together even
as the Holy calls us back to Earth’s wounded arms.
 
and I tell her my daily prayer …  May the
hungry be fed    May the sick and the wounded
be healed    May the grieving be comforted
 
May the displaced find asylum and kindness
May we give them everything they need
May the criminal know justice from this day forth
 
           - Cynthia Poten