The Power of Prayer

I got a most unusual gift in the mail the other day: a mass card.

For you non-Catholics, that's notification that a group of religious people, in this case Brothers from a seminary in Western New York, is going to be saying prayers for me. They're doing it at the request of a lobbyist at the Capitol I've known and respected for years.

I shed Catholicism before I turned 20, and have been an ardent Unitarian-Universalist (not an oxymoron) for close to 30 years. To me that church, or society as we call ourselves in Albany, provides among other things a forum to think and talk about death and life and ethics and the other big questions of existence without having to swallow any dogma.

I haven't had much contact with Catholicism for decades, beyond weddings and funerals, but I still found the gesture of getting me a mass card very touching.

I don't think it's just some Catholic remnant from deep in my DNA, (one of the first things I did after being diagnosed with cancer in June was to contact a cousin who is a priest and asked him to pray for me) but a belief that there is a spiritual dimension to life. Isn't there? How we have lived our lives does matter. Doesn't it?

The last time I remember praying was when I was unceremoniously thrown into a dank prison cell by the police after I was arrested on a picket line during a Newspaper Guild strike against the Providence Journal 1973. I had said a bad word, actually a bad phrase, , ending in "you,'' to a cop, who took offense. Nothing like a little fear to inspire someone to get down on his knees. Maybe it worked. I was released shaken but unharmed the next morning.

So today's message: for those of you so inclined, please pray for me. For those who aren't, any and all kinds of positive thoughts are greatly appreciated. Denominational distinctions, at this point, are not important.