Giving Thanks to Saints and Haints

Prayers that invoke a spiritual entity by name have more oomph than those that don’t. Whether it’s “Heavenly Father,” “God,” or “Goddess,” specifying a deity gives the feeling of being heard, and perhaps, even answered.

I wasn’t raised in a formal religious tradition, so I’m more ‘Help me, Rhonda’ than ‘Hail Mary.’ Several years ago, my friend P. invited my family to Thanksgiving dinner. During the meal, P’s elderly mother referenced a prayer from the Bible. “What’s a Bible?” my kindergartener son blurted out, silencing the whole table. “We use the terms “Old and New Testament,” I said, choking on my turkey.

It’s hard to explain to a group of agape guests that my home-spun spirituality torques on the boundary between the mystical and the comical. That’s because as a kid, I felt a thunderous jolt of rapture whenever my divorced parents threw back their heads in laughter. Though they chuckled often enough, the times when my Mom and Dad really fell apart laughing were rare and beautiful—a bountiful feast from God’s own kitchen.

What could have been so funny to my parents, at their ages then, in the matrix of moving parts that made up their days? To my Mom one afternoon when she was forty-four, it was “bucket dog,” a mutt running around the neighborhood with a bucket over its head. To my Dad one evening at age fifty-one, it was me, impersonating an eccentric neighbor.  Now that I’m grown, I set the pieces of these memories on the table and try to assemble them. In hindsight, they don’t add up to hilarious. I know that to my Mom and Dad in those moments, though, the laughs were a rest in green pastures, and a walk by still waters.

But back to Rhonda. Though I wouldn’t exactly call her a saint, I regularly invoke her when my son’s completed homework disappears just before school departure, or when I’m late to an appointment and get stuck behind a backhoe. Sometimes the situation improves, and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, I take myself a little less seriously as I press on.

Rhonda’s toothless colleague, Tammy, is similarly helpful in a pinch. Originally a crass, hardscrabble character created by my sister for some campy art videos, Tammy has become our family’s guardian against distressing news. At any time, we can herald Tammy to slam the brakes on a tough or disgusting topic. If a plain “Don’t go there” fails to end a family member’s monologue, we ratchet up to “Don’t go there, Tammy” for a 100% guarantee. For example, I might call upon Tammy if I sense my brother’s roadkill description is about to veer into the entrails. Or worse—if the details of an intimate relationship are getting too…intimate. “Don’t go there, Tammy!”

Even my seven-year-old son (to whom I owe some basic religious education), understands that divinity has a name, and is genderless. In his most tender moments, like when he’s recuperating from an illness, he’ll gaze into my eye-soul and say, “I sure do love you, Sir.”

A parable I once read tells of a child reciting alphabet letters in the forest. A stranger asks him what he’s doing, and the boy answers that he’s praying—that even though he doesn’t know the words, God understands what he’s trying to say. Perhaps the moral of the story is that faith is simply the bold act of winging it, however ridiculous the outcome. I keep this in mind as I lay the lattice on an apple-less apple pie. “Go forth and improvise,” urges Rhonda. Tammy pumps some devil horns, and hacks out a smoker’s cough through beaming gums.