MOULTRIE — It was 1962. I was in the eighth grade, seated at a table in the library which was a study hall period. My dad had just undergone exploratory surgery. He had internal bleeding and the doctors had not given him much chance of survival.

Some 20 miles away in another hospital, my brother-in-law had been stabilized following an automobile accident. The family was shuttling between the two hospitals with their anxieties in tow. It was not a good day.

I remember it was fifth period. I sat at the third table on the row next to the outside wall of windows. I had a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” before me. I wore a denim jacket. Miss Grace Puckett was in charge of study hall. She stopped by my table and asked how my family was doing. She had taught some of them.

It’s funny how one can remember such specifics given all the water that has flowed under the bridge and the flotsam that has battered the pilings. But some memories anchor themselves in the stream of life.  

I read very little of Hemingway’s classic that day.  I recall I said a prayer…a silent prayer, not a rote technical pronunciation.

I don’t recall the exactness of my petition, only the bottom line … that God would fix things.

I had this notion, fostered by my parents and the little country church I grew up in, that one could pray anywhere, anytime — that prayer was absolutely one’s own … a soul possession that could not be taken away. And even though we always repeated “The Lord’s Prayer” in unison first thing each morning at school, my crisis called for a private line.

I doubt anyone around me even knew that I prayed. I did not interfere with what they were doing, nor were they a hindrance to me.

My prayer was not subject to politicians, legislatures nor courts.  I was not directed what to say, when to begin and when to end. There was no debate about the appropriateness of my petition, the origin of mankind, man’s significance in the universe nor the fragility of our existence, though I was quite aware of it at the moment.

It was some years later when the prayer in school issue became heated. Since then I have been mostly amused at the politicians squawking on the matter, alternately wrapping themselves in altar linen and the American Flag to perpetuate their well-feathered nests and suggesting perhaps that God would attend only one of the two political conventions.

They would lift their arms toward the heavens, shake their fists like a televangelist advertising Rolex and proclaim that they “will put God back in the classroom.”

And so I often had the urge to ask them to include the library and maybe even the lunchroom, especially on those days we had Spam.

The sacredness of prayer had been reduced to the level of plastic grins at campaign barbecues and was smothered in the smog of smoke-filled rooms where political strategies were formed.

I’ve never thought much of organized rote prayer. I guess I keep going back to the instructions of Christ who told us to go into our closets to pray. But even as personal as that relationship might be, I was not to bother Him with helping me find bream beds on the Ochlocknee.

And still today, I think people should quit blaming the courts for the failure of parents and the church in this regard. My two cents.

(Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)