(I have re-read this post and I want to be absolutely clear:  not one word of this is made up for the creative purposes of Quesera.  Mariska and Cat will vouch for this.  Chip can’t vouch – for reasons that become clear later on.  I know it is long and exceeds Chip’s word limit but……it won’t take you as long to read as my nightly prayer ritual takes me.  Every night.)  

As I think you may have deduced, I had what would be most accurately described as a radical Catholic upbringing.  For a variety of reasons I became a lapsed Catholic at some point in my career at Stigmata Girls’ College.

However, last year a change occurred.  To cut a rather long story short – a friend had a series of horrendous things happen to her and her family and following a number of events with mutual friends during which that family’s plight was canvassed at length I said, jokingly, that I would start praying to Mother Mary McKillop*.  These people are well aware of my formal status as a “lapsed Catholic” and therefore did not take my undertaking to start beseeching Mother Mary McKillop seriously.

However,  after my friend’s situation continue to decline, I decided that perhaps a prayer might not be out of place.  Certainly, it could not hurt, could it?

Given Chip’s position, “fundamentalist atheist” sums him up best, I opted not to share this information with him.  (This post is the first time he will see the full extent of it and I am scared that in his role as SYSADMIN, parts will be cut out.)  And as we sleep in different beds, at first there was no need to explain anything.  There would soon, however,  became some things that could require explaining.

At first, it all started out innocently enough.  There would be:  (1) “Our Father” (not as my Eastern Suburbs Catholic friends call it  “The Lord’s Prayer”, as clearly we are low church) (2) one decade of the rosary (3) then specific prayers directed to Mother Mary McKillop for my friend’s predicament (who I automatically also addressed as Mother Mary McKillop, St Mary of the Cross, for this is how she is known – I still use both during the prayer ritual, showing I have regressed to primary (i.e. elementary) school where everyone is known by their first name AND surname (last name)).  I stress for this post, and brevity only, she will be known as MMM.  I am not being sacrilegious.  Truly.

However, as the days and weeks wore on, my OCD kicked in.  No longer would this evening ritual be a 5 minute affair.  Somehow, and I really don’t know how, it became a 55 minute ordeal and would ultimately include St Jude, patron saint of lost causes (and my mother’s favourite saint), because I considered him the saint of last resort.  Initially, I was praying separately to first MMM, then St Jude, then return to MMM but at some point a tiny shard of common sense must have intervened because I combined them, and I think my explanation to the saints went along the lines of:  “l just felt guilty sending you away MMM while I prayed to St Jude, then bringing you back so in the interests of saintly comity, I thought I should make it a joint thing to you both. I hope that’s ok”.

And then the ritual really took off.

First, there came the addition of additional prayers:  the “Glory Be”, “Hail Holy Queen” (I have misremembered the words, and my version is like a pigeon recital of barely remembered words dimly recalled from my distant childhood – I eventually Googled to see how off I was), one which I will call “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John” (this is described as MML&J in this post, again for brevity) and another “As I lay me down to sleep” (at first I was going to make you Google these but as one of them is material to this post I have repeated them, in full.  Well, insofar as I remember them).

“Matthew, Mark, Luke and John/ Bless this bed I lie upon/ If I die before I wake/ I prayer the Lord my soul to take“.  (These 2 lines have some importance.)

And: “As I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep”.

(The similarity in the final lines of these prayers is somewhat suspicious and it looks clearly like whoever “crafted” these prayers was having a bad day and resorted to blatant canonical plagiarism, but I guess we need to forgive and move on.  I’m sure that’s somewhere in the Bible.)

Then there was a change in how I would say the decade of the rosary.  No longer could I blithely rattle off 10 “Hail Marys”, I actually had to concentrate on the words as though I were truly, devotedly, offering my supplication.  Which of course meant I had to say them out loud.  Because somehow, my OCD whispered to me, this focussed my mind.  But given I no longer even OWN rosary beads, I have to count the Hail Marys on my fingers which inevitably leads me to losing count  and of course  OCD demands I add at least one more just to be on the safe side.

In time, added to this was a new requirement:  I had to learn the Hail Mary in Italian.  The reason for this remains resolutely unclear.  There is nothing I have seen or read of MMM which indicated that she was of Italian origin – quite the contrary as she was Irish – but still the OCD dictated that I had to find and memorise this prayer.  This took me a few days.  I have no flair for languages and anyway I was quite disconcerted by the fact that that the Italian translation did not use the formal Victorian** pronouns of “thee”, “thou” and “thy” but rather used the second person “te”, “tu” and “tuo”.  Notwithstanding this reservation, I persevered and this was slotted in at the end of the decade of the rosary, but prior to the “Glory Be”.

And then came the real issue for conjugal bed sharing – somehow, for no apparent reason, I now had to twist over in my bed and on the 3rd and 8th Hail Marys, clutch onto my wooden bedhead, for the second part of the Hail Mary.  This also had to be done for the two lines of MML&J underlined above.  To do this necessitated a full body twist and then either a two fingered or three fingered grasping of the bedhead, depending on the prayer (Hail Mary only required 2 fingers, MML&J mystifyingly demanded 3 fingers).

In parallel with these prayer content and delivery specifications, there came what seemed to be an exponential increase in the number of people prayed for.  I went from 1 family to, at current count, 27 people.  The List.  All in the same order.  Couldn’t be varied.  And around the time of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami I added in a generalised prayer for the victims of that as well.  (However, after a while I felt that I mustn’t confine myself to one natural disaster so I now have a catch-all of:  earthquake, tsunami, cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, tornado, flooding, catastrophic fire, avalanche.  There is a corresponding catch-all for human induced atrocities:  war, civil unrest, genocide, discrimination or persecution on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion, creed, colour etc and now with the east African situation, that’s in there too.  For completeness, these last 2 grounds aren’t directed at MMM and St Jude – they need to go straight to Jesus – and when I ask that the dead victims go to heaven, with him I have to preface this with “in accordance with your standard operating procedure”, because otherwise I feel like I am telling Jesus what to do.)

Initially I gave MMM and St Jude quite a detailed history of all the people on The List I was praying for:  I pray for so-and-so, she has type 2 diabetes and as a consequence is legally blind”.  (This friend also mentioned that  St Clare was the patron saint of the blind so she had to be invoked as well.  So until, well tonight, I had been praying to Santa Clara which was actually her name and she allegedly had a thing with San Francesco of Assisi – but Cat and I still feel responsible for the earthquake that almost destroyed San Francesco’s church as we had been discussing, um, oral sex while we were in the crypt not long before the earthquake, so just to be safe I won’t dwell on that tryst.)

(But then I Googled tonight to be sure and in fact Santa Clara is the PATRON SAINT OF TV who was canonised as such by Pope Pius XII apparently in 1958 – so begging for her intercession for my friend’s blindness has been a waste of countless hours, unless she is somehow receiving better TV reception – which given she is BLIND would be of NO fucking assistance to her ANYWAY.)

The only time I get any respite from this is when I am, well, drunk and I point out to MMM that I am sure she would understand given her reputed fondness for more than a nun-size serving of brandy.  If she is seeing what I am going through each night, she might even be urging me to hit the bottle more often.

But with 27 people something or someone had to be culled.

I shared my concerns with Other Jackie and Al during our Girls’ Weekend Away and they, despite being quite understandably taken aback, possibly appalled, by my disclosure, wisely counselled that it was probably not necessary to recite all the particulars every night for every person.  I could rely on MMM and St Jude to remember some of the details from the night before.  They were saints after all, not Rupert Murdoch reciting monotonously “I cannot recall the details”.

Now the full-blown back story is only given for 11 or so people.  For the others, there is a bare recital of:  name, short description of ailment or problem, prayer for intercession.  I felt that this was an immense improvement and shaved a good 15 minutes off each night.

I don’t know if you know anyone with OCD, but these changes in my prayer routine were momentous.  (The obvious word here is “miraculous” but I am not going there.)

As the months wore on, 3 further changes became necessary:  first of all I had to institute a saints triage system – whereby those in most immediate need would be moved up The List, sometimes temporarily, sometimes not.  This was necessary for the obvious reason that, well, sometimes there were so many people to pray for, I would fall asleep before the end.  The second change would be the thanking for answering my pleas for intercession as in “thank you very much for interceding to assist so-and-so, but I am still a little concerned with that law firm you have directed so-and-so to .  However, I guess you know best”.  Finally I added in a general mea culpa at the end to well and truly air my Catholic guilt for not going to Mass every week (or at all since the praying started) – in place of which I had elected to monopolise MMM and St Jude for an hour every night asking for stuff.  So I had to apologise for that.

But In June something happened.  It became apparent that the nightly twisting and clutching the bedhead had caused me a serious injury.  I ignored it for a few days and then in agony I limped off to see the physio, Maeve.  Who was, yes, an Irish 20 something here on a working holiday.  Notwithstanding our obvious Catholic commonality I was edgy about describing how I injured myself to Maeve.

And so I commenced the conversation with “look, this is really embarrassing…..” and I saw her shudder and a momentary expression of horror cross her face.  She thought that this 42 year old woman in need of “work” and suspected of being a burns victim was about to reveal some unspeakable sexual perversion that young Maeve had no stomach to hear, no matter how relevant to the treatment of my injury.  Seeing that she was beginning to look very uncomfortable with this line of disclosure, I should have been straight up about the cause of my injury – left shoulder injury (GP had ventured “torn rotator cuff”) caused by repetitive, nightly twisting at specific points of my prayer ritual.  But I honestly couldn’t.  Because I recognised, as I do now typing this, that I sound. Completely. Fucking. Mad.

So I simply said:  “look, I have various OCD rituals at night that I must do and some involve wood [more alarm and slight edging away from me, as she appeared to be visualising the ghastly image of me in full S&M gear with a wooden self flagellation object], no, no I mean I have to touch wood and that is it.  The end”.

To be blunt, Maeve looked scared shitless, like the last thing she wanted me to do was take my top off so she could get access to my shoulder to do her physio stuff.  God only knew what evidence my bare flesh would reveal.  Perhaps she too would conclude, for a completely different set of reasons than those held by the Clinical Beauty Consultant, that I “had gone too far“.

Anyway, following physio, valium and Panadeine Extra (™) the injury has improved, although the nightly prayer ritual had to undergo another variation on Maeve’s instructions.   “Twisting” (or whatever it was Maeve thought I was doing) is verboten.

But the siren song of OCD is hard to resist, and accordingly I was prompted by the triage system to undertake an exceptional twist last week, such was the gravity of the prayed-for person.  I did it.  And I am now back on the valium.  For the pain.

I didn’t add myself to The List so perhaps that’s the issue.  Either that, or I’ve seriously pissed MMM and St Jude off by combining them in my nightly prayer ritual and the shoulder injury is my punishment.

Yes, that’s the power of prayer.  All manner of things may be prayed for and some of them may even come to pass.  But. Not. One. Of. Them. can be objectively linked to my almost hour long nightly prayer ritual.  Except of course, MY FUCKING SHOULDER PAIN.

* I wanted to put some photos of the key saints in – but Chip has had to go grocery shopping and I don’t know how to do it, so he is going to do it tomorrow.  Or so he says.  Frankly I think he is still reeling from this post so may be disinclined to encourage any of this.  He even made me watch Religulous last night in and attempt to shock me into rationality

**  Possibly pre-Victorian, but it is 20 years since I studied semantics or whatever it would have been that was the source of such info at uni and I have forgotten