Mind how you pray

Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA and the most powerful man behind the football World Cup in South Africa next year, has called for players to stop making religious gestures on the field, as The Southern Cross recently reported. I was immediately incensed by this, but my sister disagreed. She felt that it inappropriate for sports men and women to be making the sign of the cross on the field and praising the Lord in their victory speeches.

I remember a few years ago, sitting on tenterhooks during the last few minutes of a crucial Tri-Nations rugby clash between the Springboks and the All Blacks in New Zealand. I was among millions of South Africans whose hearts sank when a Kiwi loose forward scored the match-winning try.

But what really got my emotional knickers in a knot was when that hero of the All Blacks was walking back from the tryline and made the sign of the cross. Now, suddenly, I had desperately to shift my mindset away from seeing this fellow as an enemy of the Boks and a nasty so-and-so who “stole” victory from us, to regarding him as a fellow Catholic proud enough to wear his faith on his sleeve and give thanks to God for letting him score that try.

Well, I assume that is why he was giving thanks. Perhaps he was simply giving thanks for not having done something silly like knock-on the ball or trip over his feet.

As a rugby fan I wanted to reach into the television set, grab him by the scruff of his neck, and tell him that God wasn’t on anybody’s side in a rugby match, and how dare he give the impression that the good Lord sports a black jersey with a silver fern on the breast?

As a Christian and Catholic I should have immediately reminded myself that rugby was simply a sport and that he was doing nothing but praising the Lord for having given him the good health, skills and courage to play the game at top level.

I started thinking about prayer and  how perhaps, when God bestowed this gift on mankind, he did so on the same day that he invented our sense of humour

I was brought up in a family where prayer was part of our lives, often on an almost hourly basis. Yes, indeed, there were those times of solemn prayer when, as a family, we would kneel down and ask for deliverance from some or other illness or misfortune that had befallen one of us. But there were also times when prayers were offered in amusing supplication.

My two greats-aunts, Lala and May McHardy, devout Catholics and both recipients of papal awards for service to the Church, often resorted to prayer to overcome the smallest of life’s obstacles.

When she was young, I was told, Lala was playing in a tennis championship and couldn’t find her favourite tennis socks. A hasty prayer to St Anthony muttered between clenched teeth revealed the socks within minutes in a place she swore she’d looked for them at least a dozen times that day.

For decades afterwards, the miracle of Lala’s tennis socks was trotted out whenever the aunts felt it necessary to impress the importance of faith upon the little ones in the family.

Prayers from me and all my siblings were coming thick and fast when my mother lay on her deathbed. Well into her 80s she had, over a period of about two years, given us cause for alarm on numerous  occasions, but every time she would recover, and from being at death’s door one day she would be wanting to go to the hairdresser the next.

Then one day she called as many of her children and grandchildren as were immediately available to her bedside. She asked whether we were praying for her recovery.

We impressed on her that we were all doing so daily and sometimes hourly. And my sister, who clearly inherited a capacity for constant prayer from her great-aunt Lala, even tried to show exactly how ardently we had been praying for her mom by whipping out her rosary and getting cracking on the First Sorrowful Mystery.

My mother put her hand up to stop us gabbling on said: “Well, will you please stop.”

She was, she told us, trying very hard to die and was praying every hour of the day for the Lord to grant final relief from her discomfort and pain. And there we were, her kids, neutralising her prayers for deliverance from life with our prayers for her deliverance from death.

All of which made me wonder about prayer and the times when we were supposed to be praying for others, but were in fact praying for ourselves.