O God,

I am here.

You are here.

Amen.

Debie Thomas

The pallid child in this painting is Edvard Munch’s sister who died at 15 of tuberculosis. Something about the way Munch has streaked the paint suggests that it too is weeping, as desolate with the Passion of Despair as the bowed figure by the bed.

Debie Thomas is an Episcopalian priest who understands such despair. Her daughter’s teens have been marked by anorexia, clinical depression, social anxiety, self-harming and suicidal thoughts. Debie coaxes smoothies down her daughter’s throat when she won’t eat, bandages her arms when she finds them cut, holds her tight in the depths of depression, watches helplessly as anxiety rules her young life.

On good days, Debie also prays for her daughter and tells her repeatedly that God loves her. But on days when she is herself defeated by the chaos that is their family life and by the agony of watching her beloved child suffer, she resorts to the words above.  “For months, this was the only prayer I could pray”, she writes. “I couldn’t say ‘thank you’ and mean it. I couldn’t say ‘help’ because I was tired of asking for help. The only honest prayer I could make was one of bare-bones presence, mine and God’s.”

Debie’s prayer, formed in despair, nonetheless points to God’s presence with her in that despair.  Like her prayer, Rachmaninov’s ‘song’ too is short, spare, bleak but beautiful. In some ways, they both communicate all that needs to be said.