Action B4 faith
I couldn’t quit drinking. My son was a baby and I couldn’t quit drinking. I knew I was drinking too much and I’d always been able to quit before and then all of a sudden I couldn’t. And a friend of mine suggested that I pray, that I get on my knees in the morning and ask God for help keeping away from a drink or a drug, and I get on my knees at night and thank God for keeping me away from a drink or a drug. And I said, ‘But I don’t believe in God,’ and she said, ‘Just do it, just do it mechanically.’
Award winning poet Mary Karr began to pray and from the day that she did she was able to stop drinking. That was 18 years ago. She didnt attribute the change in her life to God and saw these prayers as an appeal to her higher self. One day at a BBQ she confessed to a friend who was an ex-drinker that she was “mouthing prayers”. He suggested that she try thanking God as she went through the day. Mary says that this didnt come easily for her – that she wasnt a grateful person. Without much hope she began to say thank you for things like a good cup of coffee. “All of a sudden“, she says “it was like the world bloomed into being. I realised that I had been so focused on complaint for most of my life that I had just missed a lot of the good things that were going on. My world view, which I had thought of as so ‘realistic’ because I didn’t believe in God, was in fact very warped by a kind of naturally depressive state of mind. It’s almost like the world was black and white and it started to bleed into technicolour before my eyes.”
Yet it was still some years later before she could say that she believed in God. She began to attend church because one Sunday morning her five year old son came and said that he wanted to go to church. When Mary asked why, the child said, “I want to see if God is there”, which Mary says is the only thing he could have said which would have got her to go to church. After that the pair of them started this thing they called God-o-rama where they would go with anybody they knew who attended any kind of church. Eventually Mary joined the Catholic Church. She says that for her “faith isn’t a feeling, it’s a set of actions.”
to ask, a stream welled up inside me;
some jade wave bouyed me forward;
and I found myself upright
inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that
and eat it.
- from ‘Disgraceland’ by Mary Karr
Mary was a recent guest on Radio National’s Encounter program. You can read the transcript of that conversation here
