From God’s Lips to My Ears

Years ago there was a popular song, One of Us by Joan Osborne that questioned “What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus tryin’ to make his way home….” Because God is so vastly beyond our comprehension, we can’t grasp what that power and grandeur must be like. As a result, we pin human traits on God; that is what we know: “a slob, a stranger on the bus.”

“Seek and you will find….”

In the short story A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets by Kevin Brockmeier, the narrator acquires God’s overcoat from a thrift store. Initially, he doesn’t know it until slips of paper begin appearing in the pockets with cryptic messages of need and want and “open-hearted pleading” that he soon comes to recognize as prayers. When he can, he finds small ways to grant them, but sometimes the amount and impossibility become overwhelming. What responsibility to receive the authentic longing of our fellow humans! And the prayers themselves have so much weight. This story is a great back-door look at faith – in sending our deepest messages to an entity that will receive them with care.

Prayer is being and doing

I love the definition of prayer from St. Therese of Lisieux: “a surge of the heart….” as we lurch sometimes unconsciously toward a being with whom we so desperately want to connect. Our hearts seek oneness with something greater than we are. Mary Oliver’s poem I Happened to Be Standing extrapolates this idea to all of creation. It isn’t just a human need to connect, to reach out, hearken back to our origins – “I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer?”

I think we are called to bear witness to this. And to recognize the same connection in our fellow human beings as Keetje Kuipers does in her poem Prayer. God hears and responds to prayer with the generosity of a mother’s love and devotion. We need to believe that to make our most feeble attempt to reach out to God and to believe that our words, spoken and unspoken would overflow God’s pockets.

A question for reflection: What do you believe prayer to be and to whom is it directed? What would you do with the power of that?

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A Fable With Slips Of White Paper
Spilling From The Pockets

Kevin Brockmeier

Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat. He was rummaging through a thrift store when he found it hanging on a rack by the fire exit, nestled between a birch-colored fisherman’s sweater and a cotton blazer with a suede patch on one of the elbows. Though the sleeves were a bit too long for him and one of the buttons was cracked, the coat fit him well across the chest and shoulders, lending him a regal look that brought a pleased yet diffident smile to his face, so the man took it to the register and paid for it. He was walking home when he discovered a slip of paper in one of the pockets. An old receipt, he thought, or maybe a to-do list forgotten by the coat’s previous owner. But when he took it out, he found a curious note typed across the front: Please help me figure out what to do about Albert.

The man wondered who had written the note, and whether, in fact, that person had figured out what to do about Albert but not, it must be said, for very long. After he got home, he folded the slip of paper into quarters and dropped it in the ceramic dish where he kept his breath mints and his car keys.

It might never have crossed his mind again had his fingers not fallen upon two more slips of paper in the coat’s pocket while he was riding the elevator up to his office the next morning. One read, Don’t let my nerves get the better of me this afternoon, and the other, I’m asking you with all humility to keep that boy away from my daughter.

The man shut himself in his office and went through the coat pocket by pocket. It had five compartments altogether: two front flap pockets, each of which lay over an angled hand-warmer pocket with the fleece almost completely worn away, as well as a small inside pocket above the left breast. He rooted through them one by one until he was sure they were completely empty, uncovering seven more slips of paper. The messages typed across the front of the slips all seemed to be wishes or requests of one sort or another. Please let my mom know I love her. I’ll never touch another cigarette as long as I live if you’ll just make the lump go away. Give me back the joy I used to know.

There was a tone of quiet intimacy to the notes, a starkness, an open-hearted pleading that seemed familiar to the man from somewhere.

Prayers, he realized.

That’s what they were prayers.

But where on earth did they come from?

He was lining them up along the edge of his desk when Eiseley from technical support rapped on the door to remind him about the ten o’clock meeting. “Half an hour of coffee and spreadsheet displays,” he said. “Should be relatively painless,” and he winked, firing an imaginary pistol at his head. As soon as Eiseley left, the man felt the prickle of an obscure instinct and checked the pockets of his coat again. He found a slip of paper reading, The only thing I’m asking is that you give my Cindy another few years. Cindy was Eiseley’s cat, familiar to everyone in the office from his Christmas cards and his online photo diary. A simple coincidence? Somehow he didn’t think so.

For the rest of the day the man kept the coat close at hand, draping it over his arm when he was inside and wearing it buttoned to the collar when he was out. By the time he locked his office for the night, he believed he had come to understand how it worked. The coat was or seemed to be a repository for prayers. Not unerringly, but often enough, when the man passed somebody on the street or stepped into a crowded room, he would tuck his hands into the coat’s pockets and feel the thin flexed form of a slip of paper brushing his fingers. He took a meeting with one of the interns from the marketing division and afterward discovered a note that read, Please, oh please, keep me from embarrassing myself. He grazed the arm of a man who was muttering obscenities, his feet planted flat on the sidewalk, and a few seconds later found a note that read, Why do you do it? Why can’t you stop torturing me?

That afternoon, on his way out, he was standing by the bank of elevators next to the waiting room when he came upon yet another prayer: All I want — just this once – is for somebody to tell me how pretty I look today. He glanced around. The only person he could see was Jenna, the receptionist, who was sitting behind the front desk with her purse in her lap and her fingers covering her lips. He stepped up to her and said, “By the way, that new girl from supplies was right.”

“Right about what?”

“I heard her talking about you in the break room. She was saying how pretty you look today. She was right. That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing.”

The brightness in her face was like the reflection of the sun in a pool of water – you could toss a stone in and watch it fracture into a thousand pieces, throwing off sparks as it gathered itself back together.

So that was one prayer, and the man could answer it, but what was he to do with all the others?

In the weeks that followed, he found thousands upon thousands more. Prayers for comfort and prayers for wealth. Prayers for love and prayers for good fortune. It seemed that at any one time half the people in the city were likely to be praying. Some of them were praying for things he could understand, even if he could not provide them, like the waitress who wanted some graceful way to back out of her wedding or the UPS driver who asked for a single night of unbroken sleep, while some were praying for things he could not even understand: Let the voice choose lunch this time. Either Amy Sussen or Amy Goodale. Nothing less than 30 percent. He walked past a ring of elementary school students playing Duck, Duck, Goose and collected a dozen notes reading, Pick me, pick me, along with one that read, I wish you would kill Matthew Brantman. He went to a one man show at the repertory theater, sitting directly next to the stage, and afterward found a handful of notes that contained nothing but the lines the actor had spoken. He made the mistake of wearing the coat to a baseball game and had to leave at the top of the second inning when slips of white paper began spilling from his pockets like confetti.

Soon the man realized that he was able to detect the pressure of an incoming prayer before it even arrived. The space around him would take on a certain elasticity, as though thousands of tiny sinews were being summoned up out of the emptiness and drawn tight, and he would know, suddenly and without question, that someone was offering his yearning up to the air. It was like the invisible resistance he remembered feeling when he tried to bring the common poles of two magnets together. The sensation was unmistakable. And it seemed that the stronger the force of the prayer, the greater the distance it was able to travel. There were prayers that he received only when he skimmed directly up against another person, but there were others that had the power to find him even when he was walking alone through the empty soccer field in the middle of the park, his footsteps setting little riffles of birds into motion. He wondered whether the prayers were something he had always subconsciously felt, he and everyone else in the world, stirring around between their bodies like invisible eddies, but which none of them had ever had the acuity to recognize for what they were, or whether he was able to perceive them only because he had happened to find the overcoat in the thrift store. He just didn’t know.

At first, when the man had realized what the coat could do, he had indulged in the kind of fantasies that used to fill his daydreams as a child. He would turn himself into the benevolent stranger, answering people’s wishes without ever revealing himself to them. Or he would use the pockets to read people’s fortunes somehow (he hadn’t yet figured out the details). Or he would be the mysterious, slightly menacing figure who would take people by the shoulder, lock gazes with them, and say, “I can tell what you’ve been thinking.” But it was not long before he gave up on those ideas.

There were so many prayers, there was so much longing in the world, and in the face of it all he began to feel helpless.

One night the man had a dream that he was walking by a hotel swimming pool, beneath a sky the same lambent blue as the water, when he recognized God spread out like a convalescent in one of the hotel’s deck chairs. “You!” the man said. “What are you doing here? I have your coat. Don’t you want it back?”

God set his magazine down on his lap, folding one of the corners over, and shook his head. “It’s yours now. They’re all yours now. I don’t want the responsibility anymore.”

“But don’t you understand?” the man said to him. “We need you down here. How could you just abandon us?”

And God answered, “I came to understand the limitations of my character.”

It was shortly after two in the morning when the man woke up. In the moonlight he could see the laundry hamper, the clay bowl, and the dozens of cardboard boxes that covered the floor of his bedroom, all of them filled with slips of white paper he could not bear to throw away.

The next day he decided to place an ad in the classified pages: “Purchased at thrift store. One overcoat, sable brown with chestnut buttons. Pockets worn. Possibly of sentimental value. Wish to return to original owner.” He allowed the ad to run for a full two weeks, going so far as to pin copies of it to the bulletin boards of several nearby churches, but he did not receive an answer. Nor, it must be said, had he honestly expected to. The coat belonged to him now. It had changed him into someone he had never expected to be. He found it hard to imagine turning back to the life he used to know, a life in which he saw people everywhere he went, in which he looked into their faces and even spoke to them, but was only able to guess at what lay in their souls.

One Saturday he took a train to the city’s pedestrian mall. It was a mild day, the first gleam of spring after a long and frigid winter, and though he did not really need the coat, he had grown so used to wearing it that he put it on without a second thought. The pedestrian mall was not far from the airport, and as he arrived he watched a low plane passing overhead, dipping through the lee waves above the river. A handful of notes appeared in his pockets: Please don’t let us fall. Please keep us from going down. Let this be the one that makes the pain go away.

The shops, restaurants, and street cafes along the pavement were quiet at first, but as the afternoon took hold, more and more people arrived. The man was walking down a set of steps toward the center of the square when he discovered a prayer that read, Let someone speak to me this time – anyone, anyone at all – or else… The prayer was a powerful one, as taut as a steel cord in the air. It appeared to be coming from the woman sitting on the edge of the dry fountain, her feet raking two straight lines in the leaves. The man sat down beside her and asked, “Or else what?”

She did not seem surprised to hear him raise the question. “Or else…” she said quietly.

He could tell by the soreness in her voice that she was about to cry.

“Or else…”

He took her by the hand. “Come on. Why don’t I buy you some coffee?” He led her to the coffeehouse, hanging his coat over the back of a chair and listening to her talk, and before long he had little question what the “or else” was. She seemed so disconsolate, so terribly isolated. He insisted she spend the rest of the afternoon with him. He took her to see the wooden boxes that were on display at a small art gallery and then the Victorian lamps in the front room of an antique store. A movie was playing at the bargain theater, a comedy, and he bought a pair of tickets for it, and after it was finished, the two of them settled down to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Finally they picked up a bag of freshly roasted pecans from a pushcart down by the river. By then the sun was falling, and the woman seemed in better spirits. He made her promise to call him the next time she needed someone to talk to.

“I will,” she said, tucking her chin into the collar of her shirt like a little girl. Though he wanted to believe her, he wondered as he rode the train home if he would ever hear from her again.

It was the next morning before he realized his overcoat was missing. He went to the lost-and-found counter at the train station and, when he was told that no one had turned it in, traveled back to the pedestrian mall to retrace his steps. He remembered draping the coat over his chair at the coffeehouse, but none of the baristas there had seen it. Nor had the manager of the movie theater. Nor had the owner of the art gallery. The man searched for it in every shop along the square, but without success. That evening, as he unlocked the door of his house, he knew that the coat had fallen out of his hands for good. It was already plain to him how much he was going to miss it. It had brought him little ease – that was true – but it had made his life incomparably richer, and he was not sure what he was going to do without it.

We are none of us so delicate as we think, though, and over the next few days, as a dozen new accounts came across his desk at work, the sharpness of his loss faded. He no longer experienced the compulsion to hunt through his pockets all the time. He stopped feeling as though he had made some terrible mistake. Eventually he was left with only a small ache in the back of his mind, no larger than a pebble, and a lingering sensitivity to the currents of hope and longing that flowed through the air.

And at Pang Lin’s Chinese Restaurant a new sign soon appeared in the window: custom fortune cookies made nightly and on the premises. The diners at the restaurant found the fortune cookies brittle and tasteless, but the messages inside were unlike any they had ever seen, and before long they developed a reputation for their peculiarity and their singular wisdom. Crack open one of the cookies at Pang Lin’s, it was said, and you never knew what fortune you might find inside.

Please let the test be canceled.

Thy will be done, but I could really use a woman right about now.

Why would you do something like this to me? Why?

Oh make me happy.

I Happened To Be Standing

by Mary Oliver

I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?

I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.

He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

“I Happened To Be Standing” by Mary Oliver from A Thousand Mornings.

Prayer
by Keetje Kuipers

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.