God Help Me

What is Prayer?

In the year 2000, I lived for a year on a remote beach in Suffolk. My first novel had just come out, and I could have been in London, but I was tired.

I’d become close friends with a man called Tim, the same age as my parents, who I’d met a few years earlier. It was his idea for me to live here. He owned a cottage at one end of the ‘street’, and said he could rent me the other, smaller one.

He was only there at weekends, so during the week I was mostly alone, could go days without hearing another human voice. I’d always hated the morning, but now I found myself up before sunrise every day, rushing out to greet the water, regardless of the weather, that merciless, whistling wind that arrived direct from Siberia.

It was the first time I’d experienced real silence, and what I found was that, at first, I’d hear my own voice, but so long as I stayed by the sea, that voice would stop, and I’d be left with... nothing. Sometimes I’d talk to the sea, but often I’d simply gaze in adoration, in worship, in prayer.

A couple of years earlier, Tim had said to me ‘You don’t rest, do you?’ I hadn’t even understood him at the time, but now I could see it was true. For the first time in my life, I truly need rest. I was only twenty-six now, but I was exhausted and broken inside.

I didn’t know what the sea was, or what it represented. There was nothing intellectual about the experience. I just felt held and loved, and I loved it in return. It was the only place I felt truly safe , so you could say I was hiding, and yet, I was also healing, submitting to something greater than me instead of trying to power my way out of trouble. And I was doing it in partnership with Tim who was reparenting me spiritually, though I didn’t realise it.

Tim was descended from aristocracy, his family used to own a manor a couple of miles away, but now he lived in this curious, cocooned place. He was the first person I’d met who’d had years of psychotherapy. He was a Christian, but like any truly religious person, what he spoke of was universal. I went to church with him a couple of times, out of politeness, but didn’t much enjoy it. I preferred our conversations after dinner by the fire, when he would quote the desert fathers.

‘You have a second universe with you, a sun, a moon, and also stars.’

He was fond of this one too: ‘The only thing I know, is that I know not. The only thing I am, is that I am not.’

I soon understood that I couldn’t use my intellectual training to understand these couplets. I needed to sit with them, side-by-side, in silence.

I found that I could speak with Tim in a way I’d been longing to speak to someone for my entire life. I could admit to him that I believed in god sometimes, even if I didn’t know what this meant. When the Iraq war broke out, I was staying with him in his flat in London. When I awoke, he told me he’d been praying since early morning and I wondered what difference this made — if it was to make him feel better, or if it affected anyone else.

‘Do you believe in a cosmic struggle between good and evil?’ he asked me once.

I didn’t know. But I was open with Tim about how much pain I was in, how much I suffered every day. He told me it was necessary.

‘As long as you are a heart, you must suffer,’ he said, something I would only understand twenty years later.

He told me that the first and only prayer anyone needed was ‘God help me,’ and I found myself repeating it, in different ways, almost every day, sometimes when I was drunk and desperate in the middle of the night, wondering how I would possibly go on.

The first time I ever did this I was in my parents’ house, in my childhood bedroom, begging the god I wasn’t sure I believed in to get me out of the hell that my mind had become. I’d been raised in an atheist home and falling to my knees like this would have been embarrassing had I not been so desperate. I didn’t realise that I was following in a long tradition of supplicants who had fallen to the floor in desperation, that this was a time-honoured staple of the human experience.

As Philip and Carol Zaleski write in Prayer, a History, prayer can encompass an astonishing range of situations:

A recovering alcoholic reciting the Serenity Prayer, a Catholic nun telling her beads, a child crossing himself before a meal, a quaking Shaker, a meditating yogini, a Huichol Indian chewing a peyote button, a Zen monk in sartori... one may sit, stand, run, kneel, fall prostrate, dance, faint… chant, sing, shout, mutter, groan, or keep silent.

It seems to me that prayer is about surrendering the ego — the I — to something greater, the part of the mind which believes it is separate. It’s possible to do this in a secular way, except one still has to admit that there is something greater, though we don’t have to call this god. In fact, each person’s definition of God varies so widely that the word can begin to lose meaning.

When I stood before the sea, I wasn’t surrendering to Poseidon or any other deity, but to that body of water in front of me which nonetheless felt like a being with emotions and wisdom, one I could trust, who could hold me effortlessly and unconditionally. Perhaps this was projection, but it gave me peace for perhaps the first time in my life. For that half hour each morning, my thoughts would stop, much like repeating Hail Mary or Hare Rama or any mantra or prayer.

The ego’s primary weapon is thought. This is how it addresses us. It’s why positive self-talk doesn’t work for long. The ego just returns, with a counter-argument. Instead, we need to either observe its voice, or simply let it go. This, I’ve come to realise, is what is meant by faith. Whether or not one believes in god, without faith, we could barely get through a single day without being tormented by worry, by the terror that accompanies the realisation that everything is out of control, a state I’ve experienced many times in the past, when I was at my lowest.

I visited Tim on that beach a year ago, a few weeks before he died. I remember seeing him looking at me while I stood on the shingle and stared out at the water. I wonder if he knew he was the one who introduced me to prayer without my even knowing it. This wasn’t an attempt at evangelism; it was a way of showing me how to find a little peace in a world which is mostly without it. I haven’t been back to that beach since then, but there’s a postcard of it beside my bed which I look at first thing in the morning. A part of me feels like I’m always there, staring at the waves, as I know a part of him is too.