by Kosisochukwu W. Ugwuede
For many years, after my father woke, he drank tea. We set out before him each morning, a teacup, a saucer and a teaspoon, a packet of Lipton tea, a flask full of boiling water, a tin of Peak milk and a plastic jar of St. Louis sugar cubes. After his morning bath, he made a cup of milky Lipton tea, sipped slowly, one leg crossed over the other where he sat at the edge of his side of the bed reading a paper while listening to raucous radio presenters dissect the day’s news headline. For many years, he started his day like this. A bath. A hot cup of Lipton tea. A few newspaper pages. A raucous morning talk show. A bath. A hot cup of Lipton tea. A few newspaper pages. A raucous morning talk show. Then he walked out the door larger-than-life.
Twice, in the book of Leviticus, Moses instructs Israel’s priests: “The fire on the altar is to be kept burning; it must not go out. Fire must be kept burning on the altar continually; it must not go out.”
::
Because we loved Jesus a little too much, every Catholic family in this town had one. An altar. They were simple affairs: a small corner table, often in the living room, over which was draped white lace. There now, Joseph in his red cloak, cradling baby Jesus in one hand and holding up a staff in the other. There now, Mary, in her flowing robe, head bowed, a small smile on her face. Centered was Jesus on a cross; abs chiseled, a drop of blood or two at the sites where nails pierce through skin, muscles and bones into wood. But this was not gory enough. So there was too an image of his bloodied face, an anguished imprint on Veronica’s handkerchief after she offered him kindness on his weary way to Golgotha.
Once, there was a memorable crucifix on our family altar. The cross was built like a miniature terrarium. Inside, Jesus hung. All around him, plastic flowers and decorative lights climbed the walls of its glass encasement. At dawn, the cross plugged in, the crucifix glowed a warm orange that created an aura I imagined as heaven, pleased, listening as we prayed, granting our every mouthed desire and our deepest unspoken longings.
We’ve built and dismantled a number of altars, none in those years when my parents tussled over what kind of Christians we were going to be. When they did decide, the altars became the focal point of our mornings. We knelt before the statues, lit two long candles and made our requests: safety, exam successes, financial blessings, healing for sick bodies, peace in Nigeria, for our extended family all over the country and around the world. We gave thanks. We asked St. Michael the archangel to “defend us on the day of battle.” We asked Mary to “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
A family that prays together stays together but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The crucifix splintered, toppled over by a curtain billowing on a windy afternoon. We rebuilt and dismantled and rebuilt and dismantled and dismantle…
V: Holy Family of Nazareth;
R: Make our family one with you.
::
My sister wants my help in picking a name for her unborn child, this child we have waited for with bated breath. I squeal where I am seated on the floor of my Oregon apartment when the news reaches me. It’s a little serendipitous; I am attempting to help name a child at a time when I am reclaiming my own name in its entirety.
Names are prayers: of thanksgiving, of supplication, of reverence, a battle cry. In the days that follow, I send her one name after another. I send her Yagazielum: may it go well with you. Kamsiyo: just as I have asked. Akaolisa: the hand of God. Ifemelunamma: something that occurs in beauty. Keside: how it was written. On and on, we call her forth. Because every time someone calls you by your name, they are saying a prayer. Imagine the many times we are called for the many things people need us for. Imagine all those prayers… imagine all those prayers as feeble embers clumping together, catching fire, blazing and blazing and blazing, and if you were to never say a prayer in your short life, how so much has already been offered on your behalf by the ones who call you by your name.
::
“I’ll be praying for you is a phrase that falls between I am thinking of you and I will drop off a casserole,” writes Benjamin Dueholm.
::
One Monday in January, I stayed up late to wish one of my oldest friends a happy birthday. He was pleased I remembered—my Calendar reminds me every year—and asked for a birthday prayer. I told him what I tell anyone who asks: I haven’t said a prayer in some time. Were I to say one now, I don’t know that anyone listens. I said to him instead; if the depths of our hearts housed our most genuine desires, gave them life, then from the depths of my heart, I hoped the new year be kind to him, reaffirm his life’s path, salve those moments of unsureness that threatened to break him the year prior. Amen, he said, then added that he would pray for me, for a Saul experience. We laughed and hung up.
Months later, I ordered a rosary online. Perhaps I’d hoped to pray with it or it was simply a gesture at praying. After it arrived, I would listen to a woman’s voice recite the Five Sorrowful Mysteries curled in my bed, fingering the beads, a reassuring talisman.
::
In what I believe is my most vivid memory of my grandmother, she is praying. It is evening. The compound is quiet. Dinner is ready and she has been served where she sits outside the house leaning against a fat pillar. She is visiting from the village. Her smell is of tobacco, her physique is like her son’s: lean, formerly tall, skin the color of a beautiful night. After she washes her hands, she takes a little clump of food and spreads it eastward, takes a little more and spreads it at an angle away from the first. She mutters under her breath; a gratitude and an invitation to those long gone to share in her meal.
The dead never quite leave us, and we never quite leave them, so we invite them for dinner. Here, sit, we say. Have a morsel. We ask them for help with an unruly child or an aching knee. We ask how to make sweet a sour relationship or how to taste where bitterness pools. We ask them how to weather the coming seasons. We say, since you have walked this path, walk with me lest I stumble and fall.
::
Years ago, while at the university campus in Nsukka, I watched students repurpose the tennis courts to charged prayer grounds every weekday, twice as charged on Sundays. I watched them with fleeting fascination as I wandered from hostel to classes to St. Peter’s for mass: teenagers quivering on a spot, bent over, voices raised, hands lifted to the sky, heads bobbing up, down, left, right consumed by their fellowship.
There are two images from photographer Andrew Esiebo’s project titled God is Alive that remind me of this time. In both images, two women are sprawled on the floor. One’s rounded scarf has found a new resting place next to her prostrate form. Two swollen feet in lilac flip flops barely make it into the frame. Her face is scrunched into that peculiar, anguished expression of praying Pentecostals. In both photographs, the women have their hands raised even on the floor, bodies stretched in surrender, abandoned to something consuming and unnamable.
After I joined a campus fellowship in pursuit of some spiritual fervency I could not find in vespers and masses, I found myself on one occasion or two at the courts praying with the rest of a fellowship group. I seemed to watch myself with the same curiosity as I’d watched other students, fascinated and frustrated in equal measure by an inability to abandon myself to the enterprise. Yes, there was the inadvertent performance of praying this way, “raising one’s heart and mind” on a lawn tennis court in the middle of a university campus. But, there was too the superfluousness of speech, the absence of silence, that Still Small Voice I’d been taught to listen for. So my hands remained stiff at my sides, my voice buried underneath louder voices, my feet planted on a spot of concrete floor, unyielding.
::
The farther I go, the fainter I hear him. In the solitude of night, clawing at an ache I cannot soothe, nursing dreads I cannot shake; when weariness of world afire descends, when the leech that is my spirit lusts and lusts for something even it doesn’t know, my soul seeks sustenance in songs, of the cold and broken hallelujah kinds. This too is prayer, incoherent and despairing.
Minor chords curl into the absence cored deep within me, voices roil something from somewhere bottomless and out comes tumbling shrillness or deep growling that pulls me apart and together in unconscious yielding to something outside and inside and uncontainable. A saving grace. “You know and I know,” writes Brian Doyle, “that a song can save your life.” A song just may save my soul.
::
Give thanks. For life, for love, for warmth, for song. Give thanks for how far, how well, how strong, how long. Give thanks for daily bread. Give thanks for friendships abiding and long lost. Give thanks for sisterhood, for the ironies of nationhood and the strangeness of belonging. Give thanks for small freedoms, for art, for literature, for music. Give thanks for longing, for the hair-raising trills of a lingering hand, for the way a kiss opens up way more than an eager mouth. Give thanks. Give thanks for the earth that bears you up and the sun that keeps you warm and the stars that guide you home. Give thanks for consciousness and the cessation of it all someday. There are chapters that must come to an end for a story to be well told.
Give thanks to Whom?
::
Here, let me correct something. You see, my daily life is in fact interspersed by prayer. An Our Father in the middle of reading a book, a Hail Mary to dispel encroaching darkness, a “God abeg” every other few minutes, an all-encompassing prayer of a woman who is at the end of herself, who arrives there very often.
“Neither I nor the poets I love have found the keys to the kingdom of prayer,” writes Padraig Ó Tuama, “and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to.”
::
One Sunday in January, I made what will be my last interstate road trip. The roads are unsafe now. There are kidnappings every so often. The bandits have no dossiers. They kidnap the rich and the poor, the young and old and they ask for millions in ransoms. In the market a day before I leave Enugu, I will overhear a trader tell his neighbor how a man and the corpse he was going to bury were kidnapped on the highway from Lagos to eastern Nigeria. The government does nothing. As I sit at my desk writing this, at least one hundred and sixty-eight train travelers have been held captive since a group of bandits attacked a train bound for Abuja from Kaduna bombing sections of it, opening gunfire in various coaches and whisking away victims. The president has not even feigned concern with his senile speeches.
At the bus park on the morning of my trip, I notice small, unusual things: travelers are few, mostly women, people talk little, the air feels tense. I study the driver and, when we finally board the bus, listen to the sound of the engine. I am trying to ascertain the bus’ health, the driver’s nimbleness. Were we to be forewarned of an impending attack, will the driver drive us to safety in time or know to stop the bus and let us scamper? As we inch out of the park, something usual happens. A passenger intones a worship song and leads everyone into a morning prayer. I don’t join in. Halfway into the trip, many are asleep. I cannot sleep. Every time the bus slows or a checkpoint looms, I wonder if this is the day or the how. To ease my mind, I mutter again and again, please Lord get us to our loved ones in one piece. Hours later, we arrive in Enugu without any mishap. I return to Lagos on an airplane.
::
A familiar evening scene: a man has returned home to an enthusiastic welcome. His young daughter hurries down the steps and his wife follows, balancing a boy on her hip. The house and its majestic pillars tower above them. He lifts her up above his head and exclaims, “ada m nwanyi!” He wonders why she is still awake but not for long. All four walk in and his two older children are running down the stairs into his arms. As if choreographed, the older children lead the way into the sitting room, and everyone starts to kneel. “David,” he calls out to his oldest son, “pray for us.”
“In the name of the father…” he begins, and the man crosses himself.
As he prays, the boy will thank the good Lord for his parents and siblings; he will give thanks for his father’s provision and will ask the good Lord to bless the work of his father’s hands so that provision will not dry up. And this will all be well and good only that the father who kneels in the sitting room has just returned from cashing a hefty cheque another father somewhere in Lagos has been forced to part within order to see his son again. This father kneels knowing that the Nigerian god understands the hustle, understands that a man who cannot drop cash when his wife, or children or mistress need it is no man, that a man has to do what he has to do, that the mortician, when he prays each morning for a good workday is asking, really, for grief he will not know.
::
The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria have gathered. It is June 27, 1993, the year I turn two in the month I ought to have been born. An election has just occurred twelve days prior. A winner has emerged. But in the manner of military dictators, the one in charge refuses to relinquish power. There are protests, anger and frustration pouring out into the streets. What is prayer if not inviting God to intervene in matters concerning these paradoxical creatures of his down below? So the bishops pray, spare this nation, Nigeria, from chaos, anarchy and doom. In every parish around the country, at every Mass, faithfuls take a minute or two to say a Prayer for Nigeria in Distress. Lord, we are weighed down, they pray, not only by uncertainty, but also by moral, economic, and political problems. Listen to the cries of your people, they plead. It has been 30 years since then.
“The very question ‘Does prayer work?’”, writes C.S. Lewis, “puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine—something that functions automatically.” But to pray, to ask, is to either be granted one’s request. Or not.
Nigeria continues to tether on the edges of its cracks, and once, I spoke to a Catholic priest who, vexed by abductions of clergy across the country and the persistent killings of Christian faithful in the north, wondered aloud why this prayer was still being said particularly in parishes where moral, economic and political problems blur and bleed in ways unbecoming of the church. On the rare occasions when I attend mass, when I join a chorus of voices to recite this prayer, I do so with some skepticism now. It feels like mindless repetition. I wonder if the voices alongside mine believe these words they say effectual, believe this country salvageable, yet, it is not the well who need a doctor.
In Luke’s account of the Agony in the Garden, as Jesus, so anguished his sweat was like drops of blood falling into the ground, pleads for his impending cup of suffering to pass over, the disciples sleep because they are exhausted from sorrow. In Mathew’s account, they sleep because their eyes are heavy. Mark’s account is Mathew’s. Each time, when Jesus returns to them and finds them asleep, he orders, in spite of their exhaustion, get up and pray.
::
At a parish my mother attends, you can buy a minute or two of prayer. She likes to make these transactions, why, I cannot tell. For a few hundred naira, she scratches a card and enters a series of numbers into her phone. The priest, a shrewd businessman, tells her that her enemies will not see her, and that success and miracles are on the way. Amen, she screams into her phone. Amen! Amen! Then, the call disconnects, the numbers self-destruct and her face beams for a few minutes longer until the next Sunday.
::
My good friend Hassan’s favorite surah is in the hundred and third chapter of the Holy Quran. “Surely, by the passage of time, man is at loss,” he says. It is often recited when one is in a rush, and is ironically, a reminder to stop and be attentive to what matters—good deeds, time with family and loved ones, community building, prayer. “It fucks with my head every time I think about it,” Hassan exclaims, because here is someone hurrying out to attend to a thing which, in the long run, may not have necessitated such immediacy, reciting a verse about how wisely and judiciously time should be utilized.
Here’s another surah he loves, paraphrased: “When men are in trouble they turn to Allah and say oh my Lord save me but the moment we remove them from danger they return to their own paths again” and this is exactly what we do! Hassan exclaims. “We beg God to help us and when our prayers are answered, we fucking turn away!”
We all need our gods in the same ways, for the same things. We need our gods for things that anguish the heart, things we need to yell about because they are within yet out of reach. We need our gods to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves until we can do it for ourselves. Or until breath leaves us and there is nothing more to do, to be.
::
Here’s Lewis again: “Where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be, or so it feels, welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is gone, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.”
::
One clasps his hands and turns his head upward toward his Maker, another whips himself as contrition. A bell summons one and a minaret, another. One pours a drink down the accouterments on his altar and another kisses the earth with his forehead again and again and again. One incants and another dances. One finds salvation in poems, another seeks the face of God in songs. One adorns herself in fine lace, another in a head covering. One goes without food, another gives up sex, yet another ambles on fire. One exorcizes, another goes to war. One sits in Absolute Silence, another shouts loud and long enough to topple a twelve feet high and six feet wide wall. One speaks in strange tongues, another with childlike simplicity. One hopes for a life after this one, another strives for ecclesial reward, and yet another, wishes for a rerun of this painful, joyful, mundane life. Who knows why or how anyone prays?
::
Works Consulted
Leviticus 6:12-13 (Christian Standard Bible)
Prayer to Saint Michael, the Archangel
The Hail Mary
“Why Pray?”, Benjamin Dueholm, Aeon Magazine, January, 2016
Catechism of the Catholic Church (St. John Damascene, Defide orth. 3, 24: PG 94, 1089C)
In The Shelter: Finding a Home in the World by Padraig Ó Tuama
The Trade. Directed by Jadesola Osiberu (2023)
“The Efficacy of Prayers” by C.S. Lewis
::
Kosisochukwu W. Ugwuede is an essayist and photographer from Enugu, Nigeria. Her essays and photographs have been published in Lolwe, DIAGRAM, TSA Contemporary Art Magazine, Bloomberg CityLab, and The Smart Set. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Oregon State University.
Image: CHI CHEN
ID: tea is poured from a white teapot into a white teacup with small handles.
Psaltery & Lyre 