Prayer: So Often The Perfect Thing

Trinity Church, Southport, offers everything that one would expect a solid, energetic Episcopal church to offer. But what we don’t usually find in our churches is a separate day for Healing Liturgy.

At Trinity, this takes place in the pretty chapel on Wednesdays at 11:00 AM. There are never more than about eight of us there. We pray together, The Celebrant reads the Gospel and offers a brief homily after which, often, we parishioners are invited to comment. This is a high participation service. A lay person does the readings of the day and a lay person leads the Litany of Healing.

After Communion those who wish to are invited to come forward to pray together for each other. For me this is the best part of this informal, cozy and friendly service. We form a circle with our hands on each other’s shoulders or backs.

 Sometimes the priest offers all the prayers in response to requests; sometimes we share that opportunity with one another. One of us in our circle always prays aloud for the priest.

For me, there is nothing more moving, more spiritually rewarding than, with our arms around each other, praying together for each other’s needs and concerns of the moment.

Last Wednesday I was not in great shape: family bad health news. The priest wasn’t there, so no Communion, but we put the service together ourselves. Four of us stayed at the end and my situation was wonderfully prayed for by three women, with whom I have prayed for years.  I was deeply touched and utterly relieved. I felt their arms; I felt their support, their caring and their faith surrounding me. Doubt and fear slipped away and I became more confident that I would be able to meet the challenge that was ahead of me.

I am sharing the experience of the Trinity Church Wednesday Healing Service, because it occurs to me that some of you might wish that there were a safe, confidential and supportive place you could go, where the focus could be essentially on healing prayer, including time for very personal prayer for the ones you love and for yourself. You do not have to be a member of Trinity Church. Everyone is welcome.

We all need to pray: for peace, for greater understanding of our differences, for releasing fear and hatred. Everything! Even if you don’t quite believe in the power of prayer, somehow the habit of doing it with a small, trusted group each week is both inspiring and healing. Faith grows.

If you would rather not go to a church, my suggestion would be that you form a group of your own and meet once a week to pray for whatever comes up in the group. So often we think we are not “good at praying” and I am here to say that that is nonsense! We can all pray. God, Universal Wisdom, Allah, Yahweh, Atman—whatever your words might be through which you acknowledge a power greater than yourself—does not give a hoot about perfect  sentences.

Only about our hearts.
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On this Memorial Day we honor all those who over many years have given their lives for freedom. Too many wars. Too many promising young lives ended abruptly. We pray for peace and an end to to the world wide concept that war is a sensible solution.

Metro North Tells No one and Goes Nowhere.

A friend and I took Metro North to New York on Wednesday. We had lunch reservations and tickets to see The Humans.

My Train Time app informed me of ALERTS in great red letters, but also declared our 10:24AM train to Grand Central to be on time.

They were right. The New York bound train was exactly on time. On the dot.

 But somewhere in Westchester we came to a halt.  Stopped dead. And we sat there: for perhaps an hour. No announcements were made. Passengers cast puzzled looks around the car. Every now and then the train moved forward slightly, raising our hopes, only to dash them as we came to a stop once more.

Finally the conductor spoke quite unintelligibly on the loud speaker, something about our being “in line” for a track.

 It turned out that the fire the night before had imperiled tracks and that both outgoing and incoming New York trains were alternately sharing a single functioning track.

My friend, Alice, gathered the above information not from Metro North, but instead, from texting her son who commutes daily.

Any further information given on board was also inaudibly spoken and boiled down inconclusively to “waiting for an up date.”

We were two and a half hours on that train. People, frantic on their phones, were cancelling lunch meetings and doctor appointments and God knows what else. We cancelled our lunch reservations.

But what about our theater tickets? Could we possibly get to West 44^th street by 2:00?

We decided to bail at 125^th Street-- if we ever got there. And we did, finally.  We, and dozens of others could not get off that train fast enough. A kind man in the mob told us where to find the Lexington subway for downtown and we bolted. Soon we were speeding to Grand Central. We charged to the Shuttle for the West Side, jumped out at 42nd and raced up to 44^th street.

 Having stopped at a tiny shop to grab a banana, we arrived at the theater  at 1:45, panting, exhilarated, and congratulating ourselves.

Two points here. Shame on Metro North! No warning, no explanation. They took the money of all those thousands of passengers—we were by no means the only train delayed, as you can imagine—and never warned us? Trapped in the train, I found myself wishing that I were the CEO of UBS or such like so that I could seriously and effectively rattle the rails of the CEO of Metro North.

Point two: When the conductor was mumbling his useless information, we, strangers, began to catch each other’s eyes. We began to connect. “Could you hear him?” I asked the grey haired man across the aisle from me.

He smiled. “I only got something about an update.”

A line formed in front of the bathroom and we chatted, ”Did you know? ”No one had known, except that there “might be delays.”

The man who instructed us about the Lexington line also assisted two women who were headed for the ballet at Lincoln Center. We poured gratitude all over him for his get- about- the- city know-how. Stuck and powerless, strangers became friendly and helpful. We became comrades.

The man from across the aisle stood beside me waiting to get off at 125^th St. He asked what play we were going to see. We chatted about The Humans, which he had seen the week before. I asked him where he was headed and he told me, pointing back toward Connecticut. "Home.”

“You are getting off here and then . . .?”

“I’ll just wait for a train to come the other way. I’ve missed my lunch meeting anyway.” he confided, as he smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“Good luck!” I shouted as the train screeched to a halt at 125^th.

 No question about it, on Metro North that Wednesday, thousands of passengers’ plans went topsy-turvy.

Still, when you think about it, considering all that can go wrong on mass transit in today’s world, although it was certainly annoying and inconvenient, the man from across the aisle had it right. It was a shrug- your- shoulders event.
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Thank you those in Spain, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Philippines, Portugal and Ukraine for reading this blog. How I would love to hear from you. Thanks to those in the USA of course!

Reluctant Online Banker Gives It A Go

I don’t do online banking. I realize that makes me a timid old lady, not up to date with the Internet world and I don’t mind. Not one bit. I enjoy the hands-on experience of entering my checks in the register, writing the numbers and reconciling my checkbook each month. When I was working I did that modest accounting for two checkbooks and found it satisfying. I use the same adding machine now that I used in those days and that pleases me in a “so there!” kind of way.

Besides online banking seems fraught with disaster. Just one more hacking opportunity for someone determined to make his/her living through cyber crime.

What I do mind is that for the last few months I have been scrambling to pay my condominium fees on time. Our fees are due on the first of the month, considered late on the fifteenth. No reminder is sent. I haven’t actually been late with my payment, but I can be standing looking at cereals at Stop and Shop when suddenly it hits me that it is the tenth of the month and I haven’t paid. The urge to race home and write the check nearly overwhelms me, as if they were going to throw me out any minute.

 I was grousing about this situation when a friend, informed me that she has automatic withdrawal to pay her monthly condo fees. She never has to think about it. That afternoon I headed for my bank armed with condo information.

The kind and helpful young woman in the office—I will call her Mary-- invites me to sit down. I explain my purpose: to set up automatic payments from the bank to my condominium each month. Right away she begins to sell me on the virtues of online banking. “No, No,” I say. “I want just this one thing.”

Her call to the condominium office reveals that the payment can indeed be automatic, but only through the online banking system of my bank.

Right! I am cooked!

Mary seizes the moment to explain that she can help me do this right now in her office—holding my hand, as it were—and then it will be accomplished. That sounds pretty good so I agree. And we do the thing: the ID number, new password, etc.  And suddenly the computer displays a big banking page that says “Welcome, Cecily.”  The bank: my new best friend, with me not at all sure I want to be welcomed.

Mary instructs me to click on Bill Pay in order to enter the payee information. I do this and what comes up is: “Bill Pay is unavailable. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Try again later.”

Mary is dismayed. I, the reluctant online banker, become even more wary. Mary says how very sorry she is and suggests that I go home and “try again later.”

I do that: Four times over a period of two and a half days. The “Bill Pay” message remains the same. On the third day I call Customer Service and while I am passed along to various people on the phone, messages pour into my ear about how fabulous, how convenient, high ranking, and superior this bank is and I confess, I want to throw the phone across the room.

 Ultimately I am shuffled through three layers of tech persons: each one moving me on to his “supervisor.” I end up with young, nice-sounding, Pete, who has me make several moves on my Mac while he engages in various maneuvers at his end—not without glitches. 

“This is a tricky problem,” Pete admits to me. “Bear with me, Cecily.” I have now been on the phone for forty-five minutes and, I have to admit that in spite of not being keen in the first place, stubbornness has set in. I "bear with" Pete.

While he is doing whatever he is doing, I seize the opportunity to tell him exactly that: how reluctant I am about using online banking, how it satisfies me to do my own checkbook and that I want this service for just one monthly transaction.

Pete laughs. “I know what you mean,” he says. ”I do my own checkbook, too. I completely understand,”

 Now I am laughing. “You do?” A tech person for a bank does his own checkbook? 

“Yup.”

I am exonerated! I  think, just as Pete announces triumphantly, “I think I’ve got it!” He tells me to log in again and click on Bill Pay—for what is the fourth time-- and what ho! It works!

I confess to Pete that I am not up for going any further with this project right now. Pete says, ”fine,” but that when I do choose to enter that payee, “you will find” he tells me, “that the system is not as intuitive as you would want.” Therefore, he goes on to say, I should “call tech help to set it up whenever I feel like it.”

“Don’t go through customer service,” Pete says, and he gives me the direct tech number for the bank. “I am so sorry, Cecily, about what a mess this has been and I absolutely understand your hesitation and frustration.”

I thank him for helping me and for making me laugh. Who knows? I may never do this. Then again, maybe I will. But I love this guy!

Born with the capacity? Resilience Re Visited

“Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists.” Maria Konnikova writes in her February New Yorker article, How People Learn To Be Resilient. “Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough never to experience any adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you are faced with obstacles, stress and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?”

I don’t know about Konnikova, but I’ve never met anyone who “was lucky enough never to experience any adversity.” Have you? After all, we have all lived through childhood, the teen years, marriage, the early parenting years, jobs, loss of every sort: the list is endless. In fact, to my way of thinking, to be alive is to experience both joy and adversity. There’s no way out of it. Sometimes a pile up of “stressors,”-- as Konnikova speaks of adversity—can feel like more than a person can bear.

 Konnikova addresses that issue. “What matters is the intensity and duration of the stressor.” That, according to scientists, seems to be the effective way resilience can be tested.

The study that Konnikova referenced in her article that interested me most was that of developmental psychologist, Emmy Werner. Werner, through her painstaking documentation and many years of follow- through, discovered that one third of the children she followed who had grown up in seriously adverse circumstances developed into “competent, confident and caring young adults.” The bottom line question was, what set these kids apart from the other two thirds who ultimately became wounded, destructive adults?

According to Werner, a child from a deprived background who demonstrated resilience might—with luck-- have met up with a particularly supportive adult: a teacher, a coach, a consistent mentor. But the surprising discovery was that the psychology of the one third of the children from deprived backgrounds who were found to be resilient, was different.

These children “tended to meet the world on their own terms. They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a positive social orientation. Most importantly,” Werner discovered, "these resilient children had . . . an internal locus of control: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. They saw themselves as orchestrators of their own fates.”

 An “internal locus of control.” “Orchestrators of their own fates.” Where did that awareness, that confidence, come from in traumatized kids: kids who had been abused, kids who had starved, kids who had little or no emotional support?

Genes? A gift from God? The accumulated knowledge of lifetimes? Whatever you believe, it is awesome that these kids had that gift. We should all be so wise! No whining, no blaming. Just getting on with it. That doesn’t mean no setbacks; it means understanding our setbacks as opportunities to learn, grow and to strengthen our ability to be compassionate.

 “Stressors “ can knock us for a loop. And if there are too many and the stress goes on over a sustained period of time, we can simply fold—whatever shape that takes for us. Still the evidence is clear that those who recover best and most quickly after a stomach-slam of suffering are those who have, as I noted in Resilience: Do We Have It? How Can We Get it? a “strong and unshakeable core of beliefs.”

Konnikova quotes clinical psychologist, George Bonanno. “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.” In other words trauma is in the mind and eye of the beholder. 

Bonanno also argues that the people who deal best with acute negative events are those who interpret them as opportunities to learn. (True, Mr Bonanno, but not until I have picked myself up off the floor.)

He goes on to say that the folks who do this best and soonest were “far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support” than those who had no “core of beliefs.”

The good news? According to Bonanno, is that we “can make ourselves less vulnerable by how we think about things.” We can learn to “reframe them in positive terms.”  

 We are definitely talking about the power of positive thinking here. We know this story; we may not be able to pull it off in our lives all that well, but we know this story for sure.

The power of positive thinking, (Dr. Norman Vincent Peale) used to be understood as a quasi/religious concept we could ponder. Nowadays study after scientific study have demonstrated its life-changing truth.

New to me are the results of Emmy Werner’s study, which demonstrated over years of observation that one third of the children she followed who came from abusive and poverty backgrounds did not learn the power of positive thinking, did not struggle to “reframe” their experiences. Instead, they were born with that power. Now that is something to ponder.

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Reminder: Beware of pointing out to a suffering friend the learning that might be gained from her experience. The friend has every right to deck you. Do  your best to remain compassionate; stay with her grief and allow her to discover whenever and whatever she may from the trauma.