A Case for Praying Again

I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic schools. Twice a week for a decade and a half, I was made to go to church and pray. The Hail Mary, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed. We repeated them in English, but they might as well have been Latin. I said them thousands of times without knowing what they meant.

Church was an obligation, not a belief. I went to satisfy my parents and followed the script because that was what was expected. I assumed that once I was free to stop, I would, and that I might never say another prayer again. Then, when I was seventeen, just months before leaving for college, something happened that forever changed my family’s life, especially my brother’s.

My brother fell off the back of a pickup truck that I was driving. He landed headfirst onto the pavement, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and immediately slipped away into a coma.

Once medics arrived, I called my dad. He and my mom were sitting on Adirondack chairs next to a bonfire at the edge of our pond. I was standing in an empty parking lot illuminated by a single floodlight and the strobes of an ambulance, and it seemed that we couldn’t have been any further apart.

His greeting was heartbreakingly cheerful. I choked back tears and told him what happened. I could picture him on the other end, his smile falling slack, my mom’s probing eyes, then her panic, the darkness they would have to run through toward the house, the scramble to find their shoes, and the desperate drive to the hospital.

Just like that, everything was different. Forever.

I have many visceral, painful memories of that night, but most often I remember how much I cried. I didn’t know much, but I knew nothing would ever be the same again. I cried for every normal day my brother would never have. I cried for the years that my parents would devote to his recovery. I cried for my baby sister, whose innocent childhood would become a harsh reality. I cried because I felt guilty for being involved.

The next few months are buried somewhere in the deepest recess of my mind. The mash of a bleak Midwestern winter, the Christmas and New Year’s Eve spent in the hospital’s cafeteria, the bandages and all the tubes, the glances I would make at him hoping that he had miraculously improved, the drowsy beep of the machine indicating otherwise, and the stacks of uneaten tins of lasagna in our fridge, dropped off by friends, while we practically lived in the ICU.

But, also, somewhere in there is my one and only memory of being affected by a prayer.

When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process, one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.

This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.

Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. I never returned to church or prayed again, yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.

It came to my mind recently while I was staring at the famous Blue Marble photo taken by astronauts in 1972, giving all of us on Earth the first glimpse of ourselves: pure, fragile, and isolated together in the vast expanse of space.

It seemed to me that if I spent a few minutes every morning with this image, my day might unfold differently. If I stayed mindful of the true scale of time and space, and of my own relative insignificance, might my anxieties seem smaller? Beauty more precious? Love more urgent? Honesty easier? Jealousy sillier? Dreams more attainable?

This is a prayer, I thought. Or this is what prayer should be.

I imagine that prayers began as compact pieces of practical wisdom, written to be remembered. Over time, though, the language and structure became unintelligible to laypeople, and their function shifted from remembering wisdom to demonstrating belief.

That is unfortunate because forgetting how to live well has never been our problem. Remembering has. We rarely fail because we don’t know the right thing to do. We fail because we lose sight of it at exactly the moment we need it.

We don’t suffer from a shortage of advice. If anything, we have the opposite problem. Every day we’re bombarded with books, podcasts, newsletters, influencers, productivity systems, and an endless stream of conflicting opinions about the right way to live.

Yet despite all of this optimization, we seem further than ever from Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia: the patient work of practicing virtues like courage, generosity, and temperance until they become part of our character.

We live inside systems that reward distraction, novelty, and conformity. Attention is bought and sold. Consumption is encouraged. Standing apart feels risky. So we drift toward whatever everyone else is doing, even when we know it isn’t making us happier.

Perhaps prayer still has something to offer us.

I mean this in the Blue Marble sense. What if we dusted off the practice of centering ourselves with helpful reminders? We could write our own prayers, filled with wisdom we cherish, images that inspire humility, and memories that remind us what matters most. And we could make a habit of recalling these prayers to ourselves, quietly, to regain our strength.

I occasionally listen to Krista Tippett’s On Being, and one interview that has stayed with me since is a conversation with Alain de Botton. He made a compelling observation that many elements we now associate with religion—rituals, moral teachings, community gatherings—once belonged to a common cultural treasury. Over time, these practices were absorbed and institutionalized by religions.

I used to love singing with others on Sundays and wondered why that kind of communal joy wasn’t more common outside of church. De Botton argues that practices like these still meet universal human needs and should be reclaimed to enrich secular public life.

I think it’s worth a shot.

I’ll tell you about an image in my mind that I try to think about every morning. I expect parents of young children might relate.

It’s not uncommon for me to lose my patience with my kids. I’ll become frustrated because I’m distracted and stressed about something, and I’ll snap at them too quickly and with too little tenderness. Then an hour later I’ll step into their room to turn off their reading light, and they’ll be crumpled up and asleep, clutching their stuffie, and I’ll just get zapped by the sight. How small and perfect they are. How big and new the world is for them. How boundless their excitement for it. How little they know. How much they need me to guide them. How I am their example.

At that moment, I feel connected to something profound. I suddenly have the deepest well of patience to be a parent.

We should notice these moments, savor them, and somehow preserve them so we can return to them when we need them most.

That is why I am praying again. And singing, too.

P.S. It’s been 26 years since Noel’s fall. Before the accident, he was a passionate ice hockey player. He regained the ability to walk, but not to skate. That didn’t stop him. He learned to skate on a sled, and for more than a decade he has played goalie for the Fort Wayne Flyers.