A Self-Evident Truth

“Jesus said that we should pray without ceasing,” the Sunday school teacher said. “That’s pretty hard to do. I think it would be good if we tried to pray every five minutes.”

Wow! What an idea. I was excited about it and decided to try it.

I was a sophomore in high school and carried with me every day a beautiful little book I had begged my grandmother to buy for me. It was a King James version of the New Testament and the book of Psalms. The cover was white kid leather; the onion skin pages had gilt edges. It fit in my small purse very well, and I referred to it often. I was in the habit of thinking about God daily.

The only way I knew how to pray was to ask for things. Of course, I never did manage to pray every five minutes, but I prayed often and often all day long at school. Mother was an atheist, and praying at home seemed uncomfortable and inappropriate, but I could pray at school. The difficulty was trying to think of what to pray for. I prayed to do well in class, to get good grades, and to understand the teacher and the lesson. I prayed to be happy. I sometimes prayed for classmates who were unhappy. I prayed for absolutely everything I could think of to ask for.

I was doing well in school. Sputnik had circled the earth just months before, sent up by the Russians. President Kennedy had told the nation that we had to do a better job of teaching our children. In my sophomore year, Redondo Union High School had instituted what they called Accelerated Classes, and I was in most of them.

School children had not yet been introduced to the wonders of backpacks. Book straps were passé, so I carried my heavy books home balanced on my three-ring binder, often six big books stacked three and three, on my right arm. At the close of school each day, I stood in front of my locker, reminding myself which classes I had homework in and taking only those books I needed.

And then, a catastrophe: I bounced into my Latin class, sat down, and suddenly remembered that I had homework there. I had not thought of it since I had left class the previous day. I had not taken my Latin book home. I had not done my homework! My heart sank into my stomach; I felt the most miserable and hopeless of sinners. Mr. Pershing had never, ever failed to ask for an assignment to be turned in. Never once all school year. I prayed a heartfelt prayer.

Mr. Pershing didn’t ask for the homework in the first five minutes, or the next, or the next. The 55-minute class period went on and on. I prayed and prayed, and a true miracle occurred, a miracle right up there with the loaves and fishes. He never asked.

I left the class a free citizen, not shamed forever at all, but escaped. No one ever found out I hadn’t done my homework!

After that, the power of prayer was real in my head, my heart, and my emotions. And it turned out I needed it. Mr. Pershing formed an after-school Latin club, the Committes Romanorum. I was the secretary. Elton Hall was the president. He was a dear friend and a passionate poet who romanticized about black velvet skies with sparkling diamonds. His dark black hair was longer than any other boy’s and went in pouffy waves across the top of his head, contrasting strongly with his very pale, freckled skin. He was of medium height and somewhat angular and awkward in his movements, not a popular boy at all, but in all of my accelerated classes and quite brilliant, even if the creator of rather hackneyed poetry.

It turned out that he was also quite good at delegating. In one of our early club meetings, he decreed that we should have a proper Roman banquet, wear togas, and eat lying down while attended by slaves. Everyone agreed. “Lynn, I’m sure you can work that out with the Home Ec teacher,” he decreed.

“Oh.”

Well, as they say, nothing ventured… I asked. The teacher was not entirely unwilling, but there were a multitude of things that had to be made to happen first: funds for the food to be secured from administration; extra credit to be arranged for senior girls willing to both cook the food and then serve as slaves to lowly first- and second-year students while wearing togas of their own contrivance no less; parental consent forms to be printed, distributed, and collected; a menu to be set that, while omitting peacock tongues, would still be something like the food we read in our textbook that Romans ate, be something that the girls could cook, and involve ingredients available at the supermarket. The largest home economics classroom would serve. But the only workaround I could envision for the “Romans” to eat lying down involved putting two chairs next to each other and pretending comfort while lying on one’s side across the seats. And the date was set, one month out.

I lived in Hermosa Beach, definitely within the school district but outside the service area of the school buses. I had ridden the city bus all of my freshman year. This school year, I had negotiated with my mother to allow me to walk to school and back—and keep the bus fare to add to my twenty-five cents a week allowance. The distance was just about three miles, and I could walk it easily in an hour. My mother assumed my motivation was financial, a clever ruse on my part. I just wanted more time out of the house, more time to be alone and think about God, life, and other essential things.

To get funds to purchase food, we needed to know exactly what food we meant to consume. I opened negations and my Latin book in front of Mrs. Cook, Home Economics teacher extraordinaire. “Could we have sheep?”

“No. Mutton tastes terrible, and lamb is too expensive.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure we can’t get a swan or a peacock either. Do we have a place to roast a pig?” I asked hopefully.

“No. How about chicken?” the pragmatic Mrs. Cook suggested.

“Well, that’s not very Roman.”

“But it’s available and a good thing for senior girls to learn how to cook.”

“Well, OK, chicken will be OK, I guess. We can pretend it’s a small peacock.”

“With mashed potatoes and gravy,” the teacher firmly added.

“Ummm. This feast isn’t shaping up to be very Roman.”

“It’s a feast, and the school is paying for it, and I’m doing a lot of extra work to make it happen. Be grateful for what you can get.”

“What about bread? See, this picture shows a round loaf divided into pie wedges. Can you make those?”

“We’re not making any bread for you. It takes way too long. Go to a bakery and ask them. I’ll give you the address of one.”

On the way home from school, I walked to the bakery. It was only an extra two miles out of my way. “You’ll have to talk to the baker. He comes in at three in the morning. Come back then.”

“How long does the baker stay here until he leaves?”

“He leaves at seven.”

“Oh.”

The next morning, I showed up at the bakery at 6:30 and, talked to the baker, showed him my bread picture in my Latin book. Told him we wanted enough bread for thirty people and that the textbook said it had to have honey in it. He didn’t have pans to make round loaves of bread, but he reluctantly agreed to make rolls with honey, enough for thirty people. He told me the cost, and I told him the date we needed them. He said I could pick them up on my way to school that day. I sat on a bench outside the school for an hour that morning until it opened.

Only a couple of small problems remained: Mrs. Cook demanded I give her the exact number of people who would be eating and explained that the school would not be paying for bread from a bakery. I’d have to get the club members to pay for that. I saw Elton and asked for help. There was no scheduled meeting before the feast. He assured me that was not a problem. All I had to do was to find each of the 30 members between classes and get their commitment to come or not and collect money from them. Since I barely knew the freshmen members, it seemed like a problem to me.

I went to Mr. Pershing and explained my need to him. He was a dry stick of a man, tall, thin, gray, and so rigidly upright it made one wonder if he could fold up enough to sit. When he spoke in class, white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, making looking at him distasteful. He had the creepy habit of lurking behind us, one after another, as we wrote tests and assignments. But he helped me. He advised me to write up what I needed, state how much money each person had to contribute, make a place for each to sign that he was coming, get the office to print it for me, and give the papers to him. He would collect them and the money for me. Bless Mr. Pershing!

School went from eight to three, and we had five minutes between classes and an hour for lunch. This month, most of my lunch hours were spent walking between the office, the Latin and Home Ec classrooms, and various students I needed to see. I was always in a hurry. Most of the things I needed to accomplish had something that needed to be done first, so I felt I was going backwards more than forwards. There were barriers and obstructionists everywhere! I packed lunches that could be eaten while walking as fast as possible. Who could have imagined that before the office could mimeograph a few pieces of paper for me, they needed to have a budget meeting to consider if it were really needful or even a good idea? In fact, this whole Roman banquet thing had never been done before. They had to think about it. I had to persuade five separate people in the office, one at a time!

It all worked. I needed help with every detail, and God was on the job! It seemed there were problems daily, impossibilities that would have stopped the entire plan. But I prayed and the problems dissolved in front of me. I learned: pray and do, pray and do, pray and do. And I discovered a self-evident truth that some people didn’t seem to know, but that was as true and provable as gravity, a truth I have used my whole life since:

If it must be done, it can be done.

P.S. Although the banquet felt anticlimactic for me, the rest of the club members enjoyed it. Everything worked well, except attempting to lie on two chairs pushed together to eat. How on earth is one supposed to eat while lying down anyway? Especially when the table is a foot taller than one’s head? Oops, never thought of that. Within five minutes, the second chairs had been shoved aside, and people sat at the tables as usual.

P.P.S. And in case you were wondering, that self-evident truth is still a Law of the Universe. It’s how I got to Vieques.