One afternoon this week, while walking on the treadmill, I clicked the television channel for the Oprah show. What good fortune: the program that afternoon included a twenty-minute segment of Oprah’s interview with the author Cormac McCarthy. Most of us have heard of, if not read, at least one of McCarthy’s ten novels, All the Pretty Horses. Perhaps we caught the recent news that McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 2007. The interview with Oprah was the first (and last, he said) television interview the author has ever done.

I was struck by several things that Cormac McCarthy said in his conversation with Oprah. They talked a lot about his years of poverty…the time he got put out of a $45 a month hotel in New Orleans because he could not pay the bill, for instance, the time he didn’t have any toothpaste and no money to buy any but found a sample tube of toothpaste in his mailbox the next time he went to get his mail. And about his choosing poverty over publicity…not taking, a $2000 speaking engagement once although he really needed money. But he needed his privacy more. McCarthy’s most thought-provoking line during this part of the interview, I thought, was when he said: “All a person needs are food and shoes.”

At one point in the conversation, Cormac McCarthy remarked that we should all express gratitude. We don’t even have to know to whom or to what we are expressing gratitude, he said…answers to those kinds of questions might be very unclear to us…yet we can still say our thanks.

Then the novelist added that we ought to pray. He said that we didn’t have to have everything figured out in order to be able to pray. We could have all our doubts and still pray and that this was a very good thing to do.

Hearing Cormac McCarthy say this about prayer on the Oprah show dovetailed with something I had read a few days earlier about prayer.

In a theology course manual I was studying, the writers of the manual talked about the alienation many feel in the world, about the fear that many have that we are “sealed into a world which is utterly without meaning.” Yet, the author went on to say, “People still pray and in praying declare that their lives have touched the transcendent.”

We respond, the chapter went on, to the words, “Let us pray,” with the expectation that we are related to Another who is concerned with us, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows. Then the author made this useful assertion: the first thing that prayer changes is the person praying! The first gift that comes from prayer is a life lived in closer alignment with the Holy, the Other. Living such a life helps move us beyond selfishness.

Finally, these sentences from the theology course manual left a strong impact on me:

We live in the midst of uncertainty in which each new moment of life holds out the possibility of being transformed by the presence of God. When things go badly we should not immediately see them as the occasion for hopeless resignation…. ‘Everything that seems fixed and done with is only a point of transition.’… We pray for the life-transforming consciousness…and for…renewing power to reshape whatever we are….

Prayer talk in the afternoon.What a delightful surprise to hear Cormac McCarthy on the Oprah show. What a useful reminder that we all have available a life-transforming resource in the simple act of prayer.

Love,

Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.