9/23/2025
Family Business: Praying and the Small Stuff
It’s been a while (month) since I’ve updated things here, and the world has dipped even deeper into madness. For the most part, we can chalk this up to life being genuinely busy in ways it often isn’t. My day job has reached a fever pitch, lovers from out of town stopped by for a visit, and things at my church have begun to gratefully take up more of my time.
But I’ve missed writing, and when I was offered a slot in a variety show with the theme “Small Wins” I decided to write about prayer, E.T., and the little things. Prayer has become more and more the center of my creative life. It’s hard lately to write with anything else in my heart but calls to God. Sometimes I worry that makes me hard to relate to. A "queer trans Christian” feels like an oxymoron, culturally speaking, especially as so many “Christians” seek to dismantle queerness as a cultural identity through politics and violence in equally cruel measures. But here I am, a handmaiden of the Lord, writing all I know how to do.
The double edged sword of growing up Catholic is that I always have a set of prayers memorized, but have recited them to the point where praying doesn’t feel like praying.
Unless I really focus, it doesn’t feel like anything. Maybe school. It feels like school. This is most true of the “Our Father.” I’ve said the prayer a thousand times, and have always struggled with it. Thinking of God as my Dad makes it very hard to talk to Him.
I think we can chalk this up to the organ music, the robes, the smoke, and hauntingly realistic crucifix at the church I grew up going to. I used to be scared to pray there, or, more specifically I used to be self-conscious about praying about the small stuff in such a big place.
And when you’re a kid, it’s mostly small stuff. The Our Father again had to take a lot of accountability here. Forgive us our trespasses? I’d been at home in the basement playing Scarface the Videogame all weekend. What are we talking about?
Going to see my Father at his work to talk about a test that didn't go my way or how they took out Batman Beyond out of the Toonami block did not feel appropriate. I already felt terrible as a child telling my dad-dad about literally anything, let alone my God-dad.
Despite being all-powerful and all-knowing, I still felt like God had more important things to do, like make more mountains or asteroids or contracts for complex commercial timber deals in the Pacific Northwest, y'know, dads.
It followed into adulthood, where a fearful respect for my father shifted into an frosty silence, and a fearful reticence around God became a vehement disbelief. It was easier to get angry than risk getting disappointed again. I stopped going to church.
I stopped praying. I stopped trying to connect with my dad about anything but the last Clint Eastwood movie I watched. I stopped talking to God about anything but the words He taught me to say. Small stuff would shrivel on the vine, big stuff would timber until the forest was flattened. It stayed flattened for years.
Shortly after I transitioned, I started going back to church for reasons too complicated and esoteric to get into. I loved church, the community, the music, the structure, but some kinds of prayer were still difficult.
What do I say to my Father? How do I trust my Dad to love me after our estrangement? How do I pray about the small stuff?
Then, right when I needed it, the Our Father again. In Church one Sunday the pastor explained that Jesus taught us Our Father, not just because the Father was important, but the Our. Like every other thing lately, it’s about those fussy little pronouns. Our Father isn’t about where we are in relation to God, it’s about where Jesus is in relation to us. He taught us to pray so that we could talk to each other like family.
If God is Our Father, then Jesus is my Brother. And I love my brother. And I can tell my Brother whatever!
It’s a lot easier now. Folding my hands and spilling my guts. The good that I’m thankful for. The bad that threatens to break me. My brother gets it. He’s been there. I just close my eyes and share.
Brother, I yelled at an email today.
Brother, you won’t believe what happened at work.
Brother, I ate mac and cheese for the last three meals. I think I’m losing it.
Brother, I don’t know how to stay happy when the government thinks my happiness is a terrorist act.
Brother, I have to make cookies for a birthday party and if they’re not good everyone will hate me.
Brother, I feel like everyone needs help and I have only so much to give. I feel thin. When that woman touched your cloak and was healed, you almost fell over from the exhaustion of. Brother, I am exhausted and half so capable of miracles as you. What should I do?
But also, Brother, thank you for airplanes, for good books, for poetry, for voice memos. For impact play. For clean bathrooms. For performance venues with good parking.
For bbq sauce and cucumber salad recipes on Instagram. For phone calls where all we do is fall asleep. For spaces like this that let me talk to people the way I talk to you.
For churches that don’t make me feel like my Dad is gonna walk in and yell at me again.
For E.T. at the Plaza. For seeing E.T. with a friend who didn’t know he was Henry Thomas, while I didn’t know I was Drew Barrymore, and neither one of us knew we were E.T. the whole time.
Thank you for stories where sensitive boys help misfits in wigs get home safely.
Thank you for helping me phone home when I need you.
Thank you for people in my life that it feels like praying to talk to. Thank you for family whenever I need it.
Thank you for good men who are like brothers and fathers all over again.
Thank you for being my brother. I love you. Talk soon.
Amen.
Yours with an open mouth
-B
