// TORONTO'S LIVE OFF THE FLOOR // 

The first time I heard my father pray at the pulpit, I was afraid. 

 

I grew up breathing the dead air between Our Father and Amen, which is to say: I came of age playing hide-and-seek in Baptist church basements, colouring on offering envelopes behind chapel pews. I learned to read by tripping over the names of Old Testament prophets, learned to count by reciting the plagues of Egypt in order: one, blood, two, frogs. I was spoon-fed verses and psalms; blessings and benedictions would cradle me in their cadence until, eyelids heavy, I drifted asleep. I was a child of the church, the daughter of a reverend, and yet — despite all this, I never quite learned how to pray.

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In Sunday school, they ease you into it, make a song out of it. They show you how to fold your hands, close your eyes, how to say “in-Jesus’-Name-I-pray” right on the beat. But when we outgrew those, we were ushered into the main chapel, shepherded into the front two pews. Miniature adults with pocketbook New Testaments, we stood still and desperately tried not to be heretics. It was there, my bird bone fingers folded over a crumpled hymnal, that I saw him for the first time: the reverend. 

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At home, my father took up little space. Usually, he was a figure reading in an armchair, or the soft shhk of chopping vegetables in the kitchen. But here at the pulpit, in his suit and tie and zealotry, he was something else — something bigger. His voice was floodwater rising up, fire raining down. It reverberated with the undercurrents of an Old Testament power, the same one that demolished cities and raised the dead. You’d believe anything he said. 

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When he began to pray, I couldn’t help it; I opened my eyes. I stared, transfixed, first at his hands, which stretched out over our bowed heads like how a barn roof bends itself over a trembling flock of sheep. I found that I couldn’t look at his face, silhouetted underneath a nine-foot cross — a cutout of something so holy I couldn’t bear it. 

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They say you go blind, looking God in the eye, so I lowered my gaze and stared at my sneakers while my father spoke.

 

My Sunday school friends easily adopted the hallowed cadence of adult prayers. In prayer circle, I watched them try on blessings like they tried on clothes, listened to them echo the rise and fall of my father’s sacred voice. Young prophets, singing psalms in the desert. When I tried, my benedictions came out stilted; my blessings hitched. I sounded like a parody, a pale imitation. I sounded nothing like my father.

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“How do you do that?” I asked my friend once, after she’d led a particularly poignant meditation. She was still blinking the worship from her eyes.

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“Do what?”

 

“How do you pray like that? Like you believe in everything you say?”

 

She stared at me, confused. “Don’t you?”

 

This, they taught us, was love: Abel’s blood crying from the earth; Abraham’s knife anticipating his only son’s flesh; David bleeding at the harp; Samson, blind and bringing a temple down; Sodom and Gomorrah reduced to embers; the dead back to life; water into wine; chariots of fire; miracles and madness.

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Behold these acts, they said. Is our God not almighty? Is He not all-loving?

 

I’ve heard it said that prayer is a type of bloodletting, and by that I think they mean to be healed, you must first bleed. Redemption, after all, is a holy destruction. You must be blind to then see, so you must first destroy yourself to be remade on your knees. Is purity not bone-white, raw to the touch? Does every crucifix not splinter with the memory of bloodstains?

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I once saw a woman rip out her hair while crying to the Lord. Feathery black strands fell from her fists like ashes over the pew where she bent over, her small frame convulsing with each invocation. 

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Bring him back, she pleaded.

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Her son, I learned later, had died from leukemia. He was nine.

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I remember the sound her hair made when it tore from her scalp: a terrible, dull ripping heard even through the wailing. The deacons rushed to her side as she moved to do it again, took her delicately by her wrists and coaxed her towards the door. But before they could make it out of the chapel, she twisted out of their grip and fell on her knees before the empty pulpit. Shaking, she offered her hands, palms up, before the cross, stray black hairs knotted between her fingers. 

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Please, she whispered, her voice a stinging raw sound, bring him back.

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The men hesitated, seemingly unable to touch this trembling creature, broken open on the church floor. A heavy silence fell over the chapel, like the walls themselves were holding their breath, waiting, begging God to put an end to this cruel game.

Suddenly, the woman screamed, “Why aren't you answering me?”

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Her hands curled back into fists. The men rushed to her side.

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When they finally ushered her out, bruises were already beginning to form on her knees, blooming like irises on her pale skin. While the image of this open wound of a woman would haunt me for years, I think I understood: it’s not worship without sacrifice, and I guess it’s not holy if it doesn’t scar. And while I don’t believe in much anymore, I think that if God replies at all, He speaks with His back to us, our bodies at His feet, and our blood on His hands.

 

One day my father asks me, “Do you still pray?” 

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It’s years later. We’re fighting. He’s angry, so am I, but he asks the question with such desperation that the red-hot retort extinguishes on my tongue. 

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The two of us have been anticipating this conversation for years. The conversation where I tell my father that I’ve renounced his God, that I have bled and bruised and still found myself unable to believe. The conversation where he tells me that this means that I’m renouncing him, too. 

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The question stretches out between us like a thread, taut with the weight of everything almost spoken. Do you still pray? 

I think of all the times I wished to be who he raised me to be. All the painful invocations in the dark: fix me, change me, make me clean, make me holy. I think of the silence that always followed, the cold shoulder of divinity. I think of Genesis floods and Exodus deserts. I think of my father’s voice. I think, I’m sorry, and can’t tell if I’m apologizing to him or his God.

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I think maybe prayer is not the incantation but the intent. Maybe it’s not the bloodletting but the willingness to bleed out. Maybe prayer is the act of bruising irises on your knees for someone you love, because you can’t bear to lose them.

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“Yeah,” I tell him. “Of course I pray.”