Rosalyn D' Mello: Say a little prayer for me

I believe prayer to be a form of breathing a meditative exercise one that compels your body and mind to be realigned Representation picI should have known mercury was in retrograde But since I hadnt been reading Susan Millers monthly forecasts I wasnt better prepared This month of March brought along with its fair share of welcome surprises a series of unexpected disappointments Wellpaying prestigious assignments that fell through for reasons not clear to me and bureaucratic hurdles the kind I hadnt previously encountered thanks to inexplicable hiccups I would have liked for the month to have ended on a high especially since its concluding also marks the closing of the financial yearOver these weeks I found myself frequently not in control of many aspects concerning my immediate fate So naturally I fell prey to an old habit one Id adopted not necessarily out of choice so much as had a tendency towards because of childhood conditioning I began to pray I believe prayer to be a form of breathing a meditative exercise one that compels your body and mind to be realigned to converse with each other and to surrender to something that is outside their collective purview something that might in fact govern their functioning I used to be rather good at conceiving of prayers but my forteacute has always been the thanksgiving mode I also prefer the notion of goodness for the sake of goodness and not for moral desert I believe you must make every attempt to be a good person not because there is a reward waiting for you when you die like an afterlife but rather by accepting the possibility that heaven may not existGrowing up Catholic I learned that if you ask you shall receive There was a kind of unconditional biblical guarantee that I always found a bit suspicious It was one of those dictums no one really explained to you Ive never been good at asking because the act of asking often suggests an entitlement that I find discomforting Because I was a little off practice I made the rookie mistake of petitioning to the source to make my problem go away But soon enough I realised that what I ought to ask the source for was really the strength to deal with said problem Then because I tried to distract myself with an episode of Season 4 of Transparent I rediscovered The Serenity Prayer It was like Id been hit by lightning Here was a delicious invocationincantationintercession that was so remarkably secular in its intonation It didnt depend on the existence of any specific belief system or nomenclature It had three clauses following the addressal to the sourceGrant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change Courage to change the things I can And wisdom to know the difference The original version is much longer and is credited to an American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr And most of us associate it with alcoholic anonymous groups and 12step programmes But really in a nutshell it could be a prayer for anyone particularly if you have an activist inclination because the premise of the prayer is not the existence of a wishgranting God but ones own sense of selfawareness Once you recognise your inability to change things that are beyond your control there is a peace that comes from acceptance Yet as feminists we must constantly be wary of the dangers of normalisation because that is how patriarchal institutions functioned for so many centuries by operating through the veneer of normalcy Which is why courage is a hopeful thing to ask for in order to be able to change the things we are actually capable of changingIf there was one grace I did actively pray for through my childhood and girlhood years into adolescence and adulthood one thing that I asked the source for it was wisdom I had long ago given up on my requests for beauty and its corollaries All I wanted was to be wise I didnt understand what it meant even to be wise I think I imagined it as one of those Moses and the Burning Bush moments You go up a mountain confront the divine then return as someone who is in the know Mosess accrual of wisdom is suggested by his returning from the Mount with white hair I see now how the white hair was a metaphor a way of suggesting that Moses had spent time on the mountain perhaps praying perhaps meditating perhaps breathing so that by the time he returned his hair had turned greyAll these years later as I inch towards 33 I find I have no shortage of grey hair But I also find I am not as wise as I would have liked to have been What I am though is perhaps preferable Its a term that has its origin in the Black Lives Matter Movement It references a state of being eternally cognisant of sociopolitical injustices and vigilant of the insidious ways in which power structures operate I am wokeDeliberating on the life and times of Everywoman Rosalyn DMello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover She tweets RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and 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