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Prayers in Prose for Morning and Night

Updated: May 25

By Ivan Popov


Preface, by Iliana Popov. For her brother August.


           I have been working on this for a while (a little over a year), and I’m not even the one who wrote it), and the whole time it has been with you in mind. Anyone could read it, but you are the only one that these prayers and confessions are shaped for, like they’re puzzle pieces cut from your reflection. I have watched you grow up, look at the world in wonder, become aware of your situation on Earth, slowly lose your innocence drop by drop, and then begin asking questions with a real sense of what the implications are. Now you can authentically reflect on the circumstances of your life, and now you are ready to read about the circumstances of your father’s life. 

I found our father’s—it’s strange to call him father, but it does not feel proper to write “Dad” here—journal eighteen months ago after he left without clearing out his apartment. I was helping our mother clear it out by pulling some boxes out from under his bed, and I noticed a tawny-colored notebook wedged between his mattress and the springs. It had the inscription Prayers in Prose for Morning and Night inside the cover, and as I flipped through it, old train tickets, boarding passes, and Polaroid pictures fell out, all from the past twenty-seven years—I think “Dad’s” forty-four now.

He didn’t use the notebook in order of its pages; toward the back, there was a flight ticket from the late nineties with an explanation of his trip to Vancouver. He would start somewhere random in the journal and then write from there for a while before starting again somewhere else, so that there are groups of entries that read like fragments of the whole. I only copied down a small bit of the entries—it is a one thousand page journal, and there were some confessions that were too bleak to reproduce. The first one I put here is about a woman he was involved with before meeting our mother, one of the earlier entries. He was still a philosophy PhD student getting his degree at Cambridge, in his first year I think. Between the pages of this confession, there’s a picture of the two of them standing in front of a motorcycle. She is beautiful, and they both look so sincerely happy. But it seems like it was his choice to leave her. And it was his choice to leave us.

I remember when I was really young, maybe seven years old, and you were four, Dad vowed to devote half of his income to helping those in need, and our mother protested that an academic in northwest Washington is not wealthy enough to make that commitment. But he stayed firm, and then became distant, and after the marriage grew more hostile, he moved into an apartment closer to the university he lectured at. Five years later, they divorced. A bit after my nineteenth birthday, he started talking vaguely about making some trip. He called it a pilgrimage sometimes, and just said that he was leaving to help people. He never told us where he went, but in his journal he mentions Russia and even talks about a monastery. But then elsewhere in the journal he talks about other places. There is a map in the middle of the journal with circles and “x” marks that form a line from Saint Petersburg to Addis Ababa.

He said that he would be gone for a year, but it’s been a little over eighteen months. I sway back and forth between worry and resentment. Each day I want him to come back, but I dread seeing his face. I hope he is all right, but if he is, I hope he regrets his decision. I wonder if his faith has been shaken, if he still thinks the way he did when he wrote the last prayers in here. I wish this journal made me forgive him, but it just complicates everything. Maybe if he was desperately depressed or panicked when he suddenly left I could be more understanding, but from this journal, it seems like he was finally at peace when he suddenly departed.

I cannot help but think that his “love of God” is selfish. People like him do whatever God “wants” them to do, and somehow it always benefits them more than anyone else. When they face hardship, it is simply God testing them, and when things are going well, it is God’s reward for their trust. He is the exemplar of the religious “devotee” who can preach for days and feel holy but only acts for himself. 

I think that Dad got lost in his own mind, that he sees ideals instead of earthly reality, like he’s existing in some infinite reality and blind to this concrete world. He cannot see what modern life has really come to. The world is falling apart, no one exists anymore, all value is placed in digital fantasies and so rarely is a good deed—it’s almost always performed for the story. I wish I lived fifty years ago and could make a simpler life for myself. Dad wishes he lived seventy years ago, with the Beats. He has always identified with them in a strange way.

I hope that my anger at him is misplaced. I hope that he is in the right and I am in the wrong, and that we are both in the wrong before God. It is a comforting thought, to believe that only God is truly right about everything and all we’re doing is making our best guesses. I wish I bought it. But I must say, that after reading some of the prayers, I felt an intense vibration inside of me and wondered if it was love. Oh, I don’t know if I believe or not, and if I do believe, I don’t know what I believe in. I felt like he was writing my thoughts—God, I hope I am not like him. Because I do not believe, and I don’t want to believe. I can’t accept this world and so I can’t accept whatever created it. I just need to understand this world better and learn how to live in it.

I’m giving you these writings now before I leave for college because I hope they will help you understand what you feel. Reading some of these prayers sparked something in me I cannot put into words – but I just don’t know if I believe him or not, if he is even sane. Either way, I hope you will feel that spark too.

With love,

Iliana





Fragment I


A Thought that is Not My Own

May I not delude myself or doubt myself, but may I be the breath of the Spirit, an expression of one Power that works in one movement. A poet is nothing but eyes and lips and a soul that breathes in revelation and breathes out music, a window between time and eternity that gasps in awe at this world and sings so that others may see what it sees. 

There can be no good if there can be no bad, no heavens without any abyss. The brightest light is birthed with the darkest darkness, and no soul can be saved without a flash of courage.The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.



Confessions

Sunday morning

           

What did I do? What did I give up? Beauty in the flesh, something I never believed I would touch. Even her name, Maria—I bowed to her in reverence as if the Holy Mother appeared before me. But why? For freedom, maybe for freedom. Is it worth it, to “give her up?”

In all ways, yes, this is what I had to do if I was to become the man I want and need to become. This is the heroic choice, the painful and noble choice that gives my life a sense of rarity and gives me the opportunity to be something more. I wanted her to be mine, but who a person is is more important than what a person has. A saint can be made to love a rock—it makes no difference what the object is, the only element that matters is the spiritual quality of the one who loves.

           Oh, that’s not even what any of it is about, though. It’s about who and what I am, the character that I was born with and cannot change. I cannot settle with anyone until I know I have something that is meant for me. I have to really become myself before I commit to anything or anyone. I am not so much seeking one thing to make me happy as I am trying to find something beyond ordinary life. I am getting closer, and I must keep striving. I am learning so much, and I am beginning to see it.

           The feelings come first, and then they produce the thoughts. If I could dissociate those two—or if I could at least distinguish them—that would be good. Some of my current thoughts: I believe that I’ll live for a long time. I believe that my mind makes things happen. I believe that the best thing for me to do is to live well, even though Time is the ultimate arbiter of my fate. And I believe that every problem in the world can be solved in the mind.


Friday

           I’m constantly turning into a different person, even over the course of a few hours, and I don’t know how to change that—one moment I’m optimistic and full of faith, the next I’m worrying about death and questioning the nature of the entire universe and what is behind it—nothing? Nothing good?

Some of my heroes have believed in what I strive to have faith in—Eliot, Weil, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Dögen, Spinoza, Eckhart, Rumi, and so on. Others of my heroes have not—Nagel, de Beauvoir, Russell, Darwin, Nietzsche, Byron, and Hume. Many, like Percy Shelley, have struggled in the same way that I struggle. I don’t know if Shelley’s “beliefs” could be any more similar to my own.

I have more personal direction in my studies now, and I’ll have more intellectual freedom with each year that passes. Could I ask for anything more? The opportunity to read and think all day with some of the smartest people I have ever met, and then to have time to go out and have the experiences that define me.







 
 
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©2023 by Colin Matthew Rahill

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