How Many Prayers Are Enough?

(how many ancestors do I need on the team?)

[art: Dasha Bobokova]

Of course what I was really asking was, “Is there any way to control this situation in which I feel so abjectly out of control?”

What if I light a red candle or a blue candle? What if I call on this saint or that saint? What if I say 10,000 mantras or 108 rosaries? Will that work? What if I call upon an angel or a world tree or light from a distant star to heal something that might be nothing or could be something but no one knows yet and there is nothing I can do about any of it but wait until the results of the biopsy come in? How do I position myself again in the driver’s seat, how do I grab the steering wheel, how do I get to decide what road I’m on and where I’m headed?

I don’t know where I’m headed.

I’m not even looking out the front window from the passenger seat. I’m not even in the back seat watching the scenery go by. I’m actually locked in the trunk, everything is dark, I can feel the car going too fast and I have no idea who’s driving or what the destination is. I’ve been kidnapped by this unexpected experience! “HELP.” I’m screaming, hoping somebody, anybody hears me.

I am panicked that I have done something wrong, that I have not done enough, that I am not worthy enough of healing, of care, of love. How can I prove my worthiness of healing? How do I earn my healing? What can I do when there is nothing that I can do?

Just before the new year I was waylaid by a terrible illness that put me in the hospital. I wrote in my last post (here) what it felt like to be unable to pray, to call upon my ancestors, to think, to do anything other than endure ravaging fevers, obliterating headaches, and mind-altering nausea. I wrote about who showed up when I did nothing—how sustained I felt, even so, by the earth, by the possums, by the mountains, by friends and family, by kin of all kinds.

More complicated in many ways was what happened when I began to feel better enough to hold on to my beads and pray again. I was still really sick and there were lots of unanswered questions about my illness with possibly terrifying answers about which I could do nothing. An oncologist scheduled a lung biopsy. The nurse outlined everything that could, statisically, go wrong with the procedure itself, scheduled for two weeks away. The results would take a week. What was I supposed to do in the meantime?

A friend, a soul sister from another life, sent me a healing visualization to help me sleep at night. It worked—and another social media friend coincidentally posted a painting of that very same image as if to confirm its power. A former student sent me sacred dirt from Chimayo and Clark made a poultice and I tried to receive the blessings from that powerful portal to which I have often piligrimaged. Christian friends asked me if it was okay if they called on Jesus for me. YES! Buddhist friends said daimoku and whispered, “Namyo renge kyo” with them, nine times each morning. My rosary friends held my heart, saw my soul, made me laugh, kept me close, as they always do. My friends with cancer, who each emerged healed this month, inspired me with their courage and their blessings. But what was I supposed to do? How could I prove that I was worthy of healing?

I’ve always disparaged Jesus in the garden asking God to take the cup from him but “not my will but thy will be done.” I’m always shouting at Jesus, “Get out. Leave the boys club and go home to Mama, you cannot reform empire, you don’t have to die. You are 33, your teachings will get better if you live, okay.” I mean it doesn’t have to be a battle of wills, right?

Except there was no way out of the hedged in garden I was in. Another beloved old friend (if you’ve read my book she got me to that charged village in the south of France….) sent me a poem, read aloud in a recording by her dearest childhood friend. Birdie who had died of breast cancer a few years ago. Trough by Judy Sorum Brown.

There is a trough in waves,

A low spot

Where horizon disappears

And only sky

And water

Are our company.

And there we lose our way

Unless

We rest, knowing the wave will bring us

To its crest again.

What if there is nothing we can do but trust the water, the trough, and the unfolding? In truth that’s all we can ever do, but only in moments of absolute crisis can we remember it.

I called on my ancestors because I love calling on my ancestors. Ancestors I had forgotten about showed up. Living friensd I had forgotten about showed up. What if we always lived in this moment, reaching out to each other, receiving care, knowing how precarious the road and uncertain the destination always was? In truth I wasn’t alone in that hedged in garden, my friends weren’t asleep at all—they were loving and caring and there was an unfamiliar joy in doing nothing but letting myself be loved…

What if the real thing I needed to do was to remember that I was enough, that I was worthy of love and care, that I was receiving love and care, no matter what. I didn’t have to earn it, I didn’t have to perform some superstitious ritual to earn it, I could just trust that ocean of love that carries us all where we truly want to go.

Could I trust that it might carry me out of this life and into another as it had with Birdie? Here is a photo of this woman I have never met whose face feels to me like one of the truest Madonnas I have ever seen and whose words have been wisdom to me in a difficult time.

It will eventually right? All of us, no one without exception, gets left behind on that journey. We leave one life to arrive on time at another. But oh this life, and how much I love it, this body and how much I love it, my family in their lives and their bodies….I think so many people are frightened of love because of the inevitible dance of farwell that it reminds us of…and yet and yet love is the only thing that is eternal. We all find each other again….My mind was a whir of worry.

The day came for my procedure. I called on the sacred needleworkers I knew to guide the hands of the interventional radiologist—Ellie Makepeace, an old woman who was a substitute grandmother for me growing up who spent every night working on her needlepoint; Emma Reeves Ellis, my husband’s great grandmother who was renouned for her quilting; Bernadette Soubirous, the young girl who witnessed the apparition of Lourdes and love to do exquisite embroidery. Unexpectedly I found myself calling on the holy hounds, the dachshunds I’d known—Count Rumi Von Rumblebuffin Von Fluffletoes whose obstinance and ferocity had been an endless source of amusement in our family for 18 years, Hansel and Gretel beloved by my grandmother, and Hugo, a fat standard doxie I’d met as a child in England who had burrowed under the duvet and cuddled with me when I was sick at my mother’s cousin’s. Burrow, I told these dogs, root up anything not nice in my lungs.

Every person who told me they were praying for me that day offered succor. Friends sent me their fathers who were doctors, their grandmothers who were healers, their pets who were comforters. I welcomed them all.

We had to leave at 5 am for the teaching hospital and it was minus two degrees outside. I knew my father Matthew was my medical champion and when the nurse assigned to me for the day was also Matthew I smiled and knew he was close. I was up front about how scared I was. I was visited by anastheologists, radiologists, pathologists doctors. Everyone explained over and over again what was going to happen. I was hooked up to an IV, set up for an EKG, positioned in a complicated posture so the doctor could get to the lung. But before they put me into a twilight sleep they needed one more cat scan for guidance.

I shut my eyes and asked the ancestral mothers to hold me. This time (see my last post) it was not the possum mother taking me up the mountain that I envisioned but my beloved Mt. Guardian herself taking me into her depths to hold me. I felt her ancient dirt all around me, knew there were stones and crystals deep inside her body that were alreaddy working on me, that there were root systems and fungal tendrils holding me close. I wasn’t jammed into the trunk of a car, I was held in the womb of the earth, as all beings are, in this winter season…hibernating with the bears. A few years ago the mountain laurel had nearly succumbed to a terrible blight—but last summer it had returned with more blossoms than ever. To everything there is a season. Hold me mother, hold me. I trust that you are holding me.

The cat scan was taking forever. I emerged from it and they sent me back in. I emerged and they sent me back in. The repositioned me, put an x of tape on upper chest and sent me back in.

Finally, I emerged again and everyone was standing there. “The node is significantly smaller,” announced the radiologist. “There’s no reason to biopsy it.”

“Oh beloved MAMA, thank you!” I said outloud. “Ave Maria gratzia plene dominus teccum. It feels like a miracle.”

The radioligist’s assistant nodded affirmatively. The radiologist smiled at me, “We’ll give it to you that’s for sure but it’s not 100% gone. You’ll have another cat scan in six weeks but I hope I don’t see you again.”

Over the years I have seen many people receive miracles in our Way of the Rose fellowship and I’ll be honest that I’ve seen a lot of people experience what I call miracle whiplash…not ready to celebrate what they have experienced but undone by it, having had their entire belief-sphere reorganized. I, too, was dumbfounded, disbelieving, and I felt unworthy of what had just transpired. How had this happened?

I did not know because I was not in control.

Was it this prayer or that prayer? I have no idea. Was it Jesus or this saint or that angel or the dirt or the mountain or what? I have no idea. What will happen in six weeks or six months or six years? I have no idea.

We are not in control but we can be in love.

And maybe that’s all we can ever be. If there is one thing I am taking from this past month’s ordeal is that I don’t know anything but love. I can receive love and I can offer love and love is the only thing that matters. My heart is overflowing with the love I have received and the love I am feeling. How will I ever express all the love in my heart? It will take 10,000 times 10,000 lifetimes. It’s all we can ever do, all we can ever know.

Right now it is VERY cold here in the Catskills and I am still very weak. But I will walk up my beloved Guardian when the weather eases and my strength returns, more in love with her than ever. I will go to my rosary circles more in love with my rose buds than ever. I will print out a bunch of new ancestor photos and spend more time each day visiting with them. Not because I want to control my life’s outcome but because I love them and have faith in them.

Faith is the opposite of fear and control. Faith is faith in the water, the mountain, and in the heart’s of each other. And faith is also faith in our own worthiness, just as we are, to receive love from each other.

This journey is still unfolding. I’m still quarantining because we don’t know what’s going on in my lungs and I’m still pretty low. I still don’t know where I’m headed. But I will trust the water, the tides, the moon, the sky, the earth and each of you to hold me on my soul’s journey through this life and all my lives.

---

Perdita Finn is the author of The Reluctant Psychic, Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she wrote The Way of the Rose. She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the dead.

This has been a Free Substack offering. I also have a paid substack which includes writing from books in progress and a monthly zoom conversation about the unseen world.