Backdoor Prayers

October 4, 2025 Pat Moriarty

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Years ago my brother Kevin gave me a print of a painting by Eric Engstrom of Thomas Wilden, a food peddler in solitary prayer at his dinner table.

I remember how it moved me.

I was at a low point in my life. As I looked at the picture I was struck by how much the old man looked like I felt.

A man in need of an answered prayer.

At the time I was at a loss for a way forward in my life. I was desperately in search of what this man appeared to have — the disposition for prayer.

Back then —

I had no spiritual home,
I was disconnected from my spiritual roots
I had grown all too self-reliant

— which meant I mostly lived in a spiritual desert.

I knew myself well enough to know that if I were ever to find the disposition for prayer it would be through a back door.

As a kid growing up in a Catholic family in the 50’s I had believed in a two-story universe with an

up there, and
down there

Praying involved entering into a magical world where vexing problems were solved through the incantation of a certain set of words designed to evoke a divine reaction.

Nothing, I thought, was beyond the power of prayer.

That was until December 8,1960 — the day Grandma Maggie died.

My grandmother was dying and for weeks the entire Moriarty clan had been praying for her life to be spared.

From my 11-year-old perspective we were

good people
praying to a good God
for a good cause
in a good and proper manner

But apparently, none of that mattered. Grandma died anyway.

How could this be?

My spiritual world collapsed. Prayer became, for me, a colossal joke.

As a young adolescent I became an agnostic.

Life, as it turned out, was so much

crueler
harsher
indifferent

than anything I could ever have imagined.

The nail in my spiritual coffin came when my father died two years later, leaving my little family without a visible means of support.

I thought, what divine cruelty.

It was then I quit believing in anything that couldn’t stand up to rigorous intellectual scrutiny.

For the next 22 years I marinated my spiritual doubts in alcohol.

Then…

without notice, alcohol viciously turned on me, stripping me of everything I held dear:

the people I cared about,
the possessions for which I so ardently worked,
the self-respect I so desperately craved.

A terrible price was extracted on my body, mind and spirit.

Then at 5 a.m. on the morning of September 25, 1979, as I lay dying on the cold, hard pavement of a deserted parking lot in Washington DC, I cast up a prayer to the heavens — a Hail Mary pass.

If there is a God

Come now
Come quickly

And so it was…

By some strange set of circumstances, defying any rational explanation, I was saved.

body
mind
spirit

In that single unvarnished request I had found mercy.

All that was required of me was that I surrender my search for

answers to questions where there were no answers
control of a world over which I had no control
security in a world where there was no such security

Like an alley cat on a cold night, I had found the back door to prayer.

I prayed without pretense when my life was slipping away and I was

too tired to resist,
too broken to hide and
too humble to pretend.

I was stripped of all pride and the burden of pretending I was all powerful.

I found humility and with it, divine grace.

At the moment I found myself reaching out for the hand of God…

…I discovered it wasn’t important HOW I found prayer but THAT I had found it.

And in that, I was in pretty good company — the great community of people who found prayer as a last resort…

…through the back door.

“I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

Just a thought…

Pat