Essays II

PRAYER:

I had night terrors when I was a child. Because I was a boy, I couldn't tell anyone how terrified I was. I found a cure in prayer.

Wait a minute, if you know me, then you know that I am not a believer. Even then, as a child, I was not a believer. But I would recite "The Lord's Prayer" or one of the Psalms we read every morning at school, and my terror would be exorcised. I did not believe. It was not the meanings of the poems that saved me. It was the sounds, the rhythms of verse, the certainty of recurrence, of return, their order replacing disorder in my young mind.