Pray Like a Child

Pray Like a Child©

By Michael Casey

When you are a kid you believe, it’s only as you grow older you get cynical and become a don’t know. As a child mum makes you say the Rosary together, the family that Prays together stay together.

“Dear Baby Jesus, can I have a bike, Amen.” Then you jump under the covers and are fast asleep in seconds. Your mum tells her sister, and you get a scooter, one of those that you push with one foot while you stand on the thing. They are very popular again now, 50 years on. As for you the child, proof that prayer works.

You get older and exams beckon, so you pray with renewed vigour, or rather your prayer life is renewed, after falling fallow, but you dig out the Rosary beads and ask for help. You mum joins in and asks the Saints to make the examiner miss your mistakes on the exam paper.

You pass your exams and then prayer is forgotten again. You can’t find a job, so the prayers start again. Your atheist brother says why not try computers, so you do. This results in a good job with good pay for 21years.Is God having a joke? Or has your mum blackmailed the Angels and Saints. A bit of both really.

So life goes on, your mum with her hand in her pinny saying the Rosary as she watches Dallas. Next you need a house, so the prayer restarts. While taking the dog, Goldie, for a walk the dog stops to pee on a garden gate. You look up, the house is for sale.

When you get home you tell your dad, he jumps on the bus to see the house. Dad cannot contain himself so he bangs on the door of the dog pee marked house. He has a look around. He sails home triumphant, “Michael Buy That House.”

So I did.

Working shifts is hard work, lots of night shifts, 14 years of them. Get over it, is what ignorant people say, to this and everything. There is a bonus though, you get to see Dawn over central Birmingham. This really is God’s Creation, 14 years of seeing dawn, some only ever see it when they stagger home from the pub.

So life good on. Mum dies suddenly, 8 weeks later dad should die, but your brother saves him with CPR. Dad is given a week to live and he will not be resuscitated if he has another heart attack. We sit in my sister's house picking hymns for his funeral.

Now today 25^th May would have been Padre Pio’s Birthday. Back then in 1996 I’d heard of him. So I prayed, I asked him to intervene. You are breathless, speechless, lots of things are in your mind, and there is nothing in your mind. Opposites. But there is also something else inside you, your mother has died but weeks before but she left 

you something, she left you Faith, faith of a child.

I put a photo  of Padre Pio under dad’s pillow. 19 people on a heart ward, 18 died. My dad did not. My dad said he heard the doctor say “wheel him to the end of the ward, he’ll be dead soon.”

That’s when dad woke up, and the doctor dropped his tea in shock. Dad spent 3 months, 12 weeks in Dudley Rd hospital or City Hospital as it’s called nowadays. I wrote about it in full in an essay Padre Pio and Me, it’s on the Internet.

So prayer goes up and down, like the swell on the sea, prayer has tides just like the sea too. Pio used to say “the prayer I say tomorrow, will have helped you yesterday.”

Ian Botham was in the news yesterday about he’s attitude  to his own sick dad, I totally understand his point of view. With our dad I visited every single day, as did my sister and other siblings visited loads too.

Now you have your nice house, and you’ve always wanted a wife and perhaps a family. However all you do is visit your dad so you’ll never meet anybody. So you say your prayers and again you ask Padre Pio to help, as if he was a marriage bureau. Then after 3 years who do you meet? Your Shanghai wife.

Kids would be nice, so you get 2. So some will say this is luck or coincidence. I chose to believe Padre Pio is in Heaven having tea with my mother. Though the pair of them might be having a look at my sister in Lourdes today, Happy Birthday Padre Pio, thanks. 

a photo from 9 years ago maybe