Dreams and prayers

More than occasionally I dream of people whom I have neither seen nor thought of in years, sometimes near on two decades. I was in high school from 2000 to 2004, and at least once every couple months nowadays a random person from high school—a stranger, not a close friend, someone I might have been “friends” with on Facebook, before I deleted my account—just walks into a dream. Not a weird dream. Not a nightmare. Just populated by people I know as well as the name and face of an almost complete stranger I last saw more than 17 years ago.

Actually, I’ve also dreamed of people I haven’t met before, and not just actors or famous people whose faces and personalities I’ve seen on TV. I’ve dreamed of writers I’ve never met plenty of times. As though they were a regular fixture of my daily life.

It’s always made me wonder: Whose dreams am I rambling around in? What almost or actual stranger woke up this morning wondering why “what’s-his-name, that Brad guy” appeared in his or her mind while sleeping last night?

*

It occurred to me this week that prayers are the same. I’ve been praying the last few weeks for someone I don’t really know. We’ve met once or twice, but we might as well be strangers, and he definitely does not know I’m praying for him. In fact, looking at the little hand-scribbled list of people to pray for on my office desk, I imagine almost none of them, even those I’m close to, know—or at least would assume—that I’m praying for them. Some of them the family members of friends, some of them students, some of them close or distant friends who are expecting a child. (I have a rule: If I know you and you’re pregnant, you will be prayed for.) But like strangers strolling through dreams, the names and faces and sufferings of the prayed-for are “present” in my life and to my mind in a way they wouldn’t guess and I wouldn’t have known to expect in advance of finding myself compelled to “add them to the list.”

Which, naturally, raises the question: Who’s praying for me? What distant relation, what tenuous acquaintance, what absolute stranger is praying for me, not just on a lark or when tragedy strikes, but every single day of the week?

I learned, after becoming a parent, the secret of someone winning my affection in the blink of an eye. The secret: letting me know you are praying for my children. You could be my mortal enemy, worthy of contempt and derision—or, less intensely, just an unlikable or unpleasant person—but if I learn that you pray for my children, my heart swells up like a balloon. All I feel for you henceforth is love and gratitude. Prayer covers a multitude of sins. I have no higher esteem than for the people in my life who, if I told them my children were in peril or need, would stop what they were doing, fall to their knees, and beg God for mercy.

Anonymous prayers are themselves a special mercy. Someone today will say a prayer for one or all of my children; even, perhaps, for me. I won’t know it. But God will hear it. Just as he hears my prayers for the unknowing prayed-for on my list.

This is a great mystery. But I am talking about the communion of the saints.