This essay was written in April 2022, about one year after the death of my father.

I only know two prayers, really. I mean, I know the Lord’s Prayer like I know the woman who delivers my mail, that is, I know of the Lord’s Prayer. I see the Lord’s Prayer every now and again, I recognize it for what it is, say “hello, there.” I could probably recite it under the right circumstances but I don’t know if I would ever feel it. I would not feel the presence of the Lord, only the presence of that institution the Church. I would think of nothing divine, only of the history and the weight of millions of men stretching back thousands of years trying to reach something higher and trying to control how other men and women think and feel in the process. I would feel the Pastor’s hand on my shoulder, see the Pope aging like all men do, see Paul getting up in the middle of the night to relieve himself and hoping (praying?) he gets back to sleep so he can feel reasonably alert the next day.

No, I do not really know the Lord’s Prayer as a prayer. Nor any of the others given to us by any of the churches and the sects in tongues ancient and modern. I do know this one: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It is simple enough, and, by my estimation, it does not ask too much. It does not require any appreciation of history, of theology, of the whence-it-came. It asks for just the right thing, and, in a neatly tautological fashion, this prayer is always appropriate. We are always faced either with a situation that we can control or a situation that we cannot. The part of me that gets perverse satisfaction from the bizarre logicality of the universe enjoys this little tautological truth, and somehow I believe that God would also appreciate it. “My child, you must know that I would never present you with something that neither can nor cannot be changed.” Presumably such situations exist but are kept in the members-only sections of heaven where we mortals are never permitted. Only for those who really understand. Keep it simple for the simple apes who think there is a meaningful difference between life and death, says the chorus of angels. Let them believe they sometimes have control. Of course, the real ask is for wisdom. How can God grant wisdom? It would seem the more wisdom is granted, the less one would feel the need to ask for it. “I am truly wise, and I know this because the wise was divinely given, so what do I need to beseech the divine for?” But we all know that the truest wisdom lies in humility and understanding how little one knows. “I am wise because I know I am not wise” says Socrates, like an ass. So we ask God for wisdom, and God shows us how wise we are not, which we take as a form of wisdom in itself, and we nod knowingly, but for all our troubles we still do not know the Difference. We have to be content in guessing, in hoping that our guess is wise, without feeling that wisdom internally, only as a sort of external validation. And that, I suppose, is what faith is all about. Running away from knowledge, but somehow still arriving at the very knowledge, finally sitting still at the summit in a state of acceptance. Serenity.

The other prayer I know is one of my own devision, or at least private, which I gather is fitting because my religion, such as it is, has always been somewhat private. How oxymoronic, or at least moronic, to espouse a “private religion.” I guess we should just call it spirituality, or belief, except it does entail a sort of relationship, if you will, with a sort of God, if you will, and so between the two of us there is something larger, at least wider, than the unity of the self. A straight line between a single point and the whole of the Universe, the line itself must be wide enough to encompass most of the sky. So it is a religion, damn it. And the only prayer in this little religion is “Okay, now.” Just “okay, now”, or “okay now” or “OKNW”. The less it looks like words, the farther away it is from the petty verbal world and the more it approaches the universal. I say “okay now” because at some point I wondered whether it would be better to die at your absolute worst moment of life or your absolute best. Or, to take it out of the perilous realm of absolutes, whether it would be better to die happy or in the absence of happiness. When I say “at some point I wondered,” I mean there is a point in the flatcircular mind-cycle of my life in which I experience this question, a point I continuously return to. How can a happy man offer himself up for death? When we are happy, we usually want time to continue, for the happiness to go on forever. But is there not within every happiness a commensurate particle of fear, that at some point this happiness must end, and that the only direction to go from absolute joy is something worse? And when we are sad, some of us want to die, feel the call of the void. But within every sadness there may reside a commensurate particle of hope, that this, too, shall pass and the only direction we can reasonably expect is something better.

Even so, what kind of significance can we rationally attach to our “last moment”? Humans have always placed special importance on this moment, although often connected with the expectation that it is not really the last, but only an inflection point, and so the character of the moment is important because it affects the life to come. “A warrior must die in battle, so he can go to Valhala” or “He died doing what he loved” or “I have summoned the priest to perform your last rites, so that you might go to Heaven.” But from the perspective of the absolute, it is just another moment. The confession you give this Sunday is just as important as the confession you give at the end of your life. The feeling you hold in your heart at this moment is just as divinely significant as that which you go out on. We are just a collection of moments; it is only a fallacy of our three-dimensional simplicity that causes us to arrange these moments in a specific order, and to attach a narrative arc to them. We love to think that stories end, and that ending carries some meaning that justifies the middle, whereas the middle never justifies the end. We don’t say, “he died a bitter old man but at least he was happy at one point in the middle there.” “There was a ten minute window at the age of forty-two where he was surrounded by loved ones” seems comical compared with the rather trite “He was surrounded by loved ones at the end.” So for better or worse, the chimpanzee who learned to read that resides within my mind demands a narrative where the ending is meaningful, and this creature seems to care how I feel in the moment before my death.

So I suppose this creature in me has decided it is better to die happy. And to die under a specific kind of happiness. Not at the moments of sheer ecstasy, of orgasm or senselessness. Not when consciousness is driven out by the screaming chorus of angels or endorphins, as it were. When the curve of “mood” approaches an exponential limit, “off the charts”, a summit above the clouds where nothing really makes sense or matters. In these moments, some of which are aptly called “the little death,” I cease to be, and so there is no room for prayer or for any kind of communication with anyone, divine or earthly. No, it is in the restful, contented moments, where the taut energy of happiness eases off just a little bit, a little slack enters into that heart-chord, and there is just enough room for some self-awareness. I take up the slack with self-awareness and reflection, and with a prayer. In these moments I say to the God who is Death, who is, in my fantasy of “private religion”, so kindly waiting for my permission to pull the lever on the trapdoor and invoke the end of time—the God who is so reasonable as to participate in a good-faith negotiation with me, who says “like the grass, thou must perish” but also “let me know what time works for you”, I say to this God, “Okay, now.”