Two quotes I’d like to start with. The first comes from my new cause, Eat, Pray, Love:

My sister is nota religious person. Nobody in my family really is. (I’ve taken to calling myself the “white sheep” of the family.) My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. [...]

Here’s another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.

The second comes from the addendum to my parent’s Christmas letter, where they told everyone about my dad’s diagnosis:

We are fortunate to have resources available to us to help and lots of family support. And prayers from many, many friends.

Please keep us in your prayers.

-signed-

My father is, if nothing else, a logical man. (When mom & I used to watch Star Trek together, his favorite character was not Spock, with his half-human occasional ill-logic, but Spock’s father, Sarek.) The resources he has available to him are the hospitals in his area, the specialists, and medical history. I won’t call my mother emotional, because all of us are, but I definitely think she leans more on religion than my father does. Her resources are friends & family: prayer. Since I am neither medical history nor a hospital, I feel that the best place that I can offer consolation, that I can be a “resources” is toward my mother. And yet I have no prayers to offer. I will not pray to anyone’s god to cure my father. All I can do is wish that my parents’ lives are filled with love & with peace. And I do. They’ve become part of my meditations: that lovingkindness is visited upon all beings, especially my parents. Prayers for health are best, in my mind, when they come from the person who is sick. It’s a way to take an active role in one’s own health: physical, mental, & spiritual.

My family often says something along one of these lines: “You’re in my prayers”, to which I say “Thank you” or, “Keep us in your prayers”, to which I have no response. Perhaps they do want the prayers of a recovering-Catholic-pagan-atheist. Perhaps they think that, by asking, I shall return & say a rosary for them. Perhaps it’s just a telephonic sign off: a Catholic “Aufwiederhören“.

Sometimes, I wish I could just offer them a casserole: a physical manifestation of my love & prayers. They live in another state, so I can’t simply show up on their doorstep with a freshly-baked (you do bake a casserole, right?) casserole. And the casserole that I would bake them (based upon my limited research into the disease: I read most but not all of the Wikipedia article on it) would be accompanied by green tea. That’s what I’d really like to do: move back in with them and replace my father’s coffee habit with green tea, my mother’s addiction to wheat with whole wheat, and remove a substantial amount of the meat & fish from their diets. Perhaps I shall send them some green tea after all, but I have little illusion that it will get drunk; or drunk by my father.

Until then, I shall continue to pray for them in my own fashion, continue to send them spiritual casseroles. But I still have no response then next time a sister asks me to keep her in my prayers.