On pain and prayer

My mother prays sitting down now. When I speak that simple fact, when I think it, it is full of desperation and self-resentment. My mother prays sitting down now — I can’t quite believe it myself either. 

Muslims pray five times per day in different intervals called Fajr, Duhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha. The prayer names translate to dawn, noon, afternoon, evening and night. Each is prayed at the time corresponding to its name, and though there is a fixed time frame for each prayer to be completed, the earlier one prays, the better. 

Though some may consider prayer to be spoken invocations to God, for Muslims, prayer also refers to the physical acts of standing, bowing and kneeling while in the presence of God. The appeals made to God and Quranic verses recited while doing so are called duaas, or supplications. The physical process of prayer goes like this: One stands up, bows down, kneels, prostrates with their forehead on the ground and gets back up to repeat the process. Each prayer differs in the number of times this process is repeated (the process is called a rak’ah, or a kneeling), but altogether, Muslims do this 17 times per day. 

Something that has always been distinct to me about the prayers Muslims perform is the physicality they require. It’s a type of worship in itself, really, to give your energy and strength to something else — an exchange to be able to submit yourself to the presence of God. 

In Islam, when one can no longer physically stand up for prayer or pick themselves up from their kneeling position, perhaps because doing so causes the individual too much pain, they are permitted to pray sitting down. This can be done sitting on the floor, sitting in a chair or even lying down in bed. For the most extreme injuries and disabilities, one is allowed to simply close their eyes and recite the prayers in their head, without needing to lift a finger. 

Prayer can be physically taxing — a reality all Muslims know and understand. Though part of the worship is in giving, the repetitions indisputably require physical exertion that, for some, can come to be too much. Still, it is not uncommon to hear Muslims who are unable to pray (women do not pray during their menstrual cycle, and travelers make up their prayers at a later date), or those who cannot pray while standing, lament that they miss their prayers and the physical act of giving that comes with them. A deep, untouchable beauty in the religion is that when one gives, it is because what they receive in return is boundless.

In Shia Islam, prostration is performed on pure earth, or on that which grows from it, to demonstrate the Prophet’s example and to symbolize the Islamic belief that we come from and return to the earth when we die. During prayer, when you kneel to give praise to God, the forehead is placed onto an article of earth. Though marble, paper, wood, stone and dirt are all permitted, most Shia Muslims use a turbah — a compact of sand from the desert of Karbala in Iraq — to comply with this ritual. This is how my mom got the injury that prevents her from standing up; one day, while getting ready to pray, she accidentally dropped a rather large and heavy turbah onto the dorsum of her foot and fractured her talus bone.

The first time I noticed her praying sitting down was when I walked into her room to grab a bracelet of hers I wanted to wear. It was typical teenage selfishness — walking into her room without knocking because she was my mom, and it was therefore my right to barge in and take something of hers without asking first. When I saw her praying from a chair that first time, I wondered how long she had been doing it before I noticed. That day, I walked out of her room with my head down.  

When I see my mom praying sitting down, I can’t help but to try and make sense of how much of the fault is mine — of all that I’ve done and haven’t done — to get her to that point. The housework, the laundry, the home-cooked meals every single day of my life, the going away to college and the leaving her in a big, empty house all alone. In my head, it isn’t the physical injury she sustained, but it’s as if I took and took and took until she just couldn’t help it anymore, and the weight of it all meant she just had to pray sitting down instead of standing up. When my thoughts really wander, I imagine each thing she gave me — be it physical, emotional or mental — was an additional straw she had to carry on her back. When the load was too heavy for her, she finally had to sit down. 

For months afterward, once I realized the extent of her injury, I wondered: At what point can we no longer come back from our pain? At what point is the injury so deep, so centered on the abilities of our being, that it changes us fundamentally, to the point that we accept that we have to pray sitting down? As we age, fractures and breaks take longer to heal, and for some people, they heal poorly or not at all. By the age of 25, bone density begins to stabilize, and by age 40, begins to outpace formation. Our tendons, with age, take longer to regenerate and lose their healing capacity, and wound healing occurs at a slower rate in aged tissues and brings additional complications. 

My mom’s worship is something she wears proudly. The black-blue bruises on her knees that have been there ever since I can remember, the tear-stricken towels she saves in her closet once she has used them to wipe the tears she cries for the martyrdom of the prophet’s grandson, the countless prayers she mutters to herself whenever she has a moment of respite, all point to the person that she is. There would be times when my mom would try to stand up to pray, despite her pain. It was a pattern: standing up, sitting down again, standing up, sitting down for longer, standing up, and what I think is now the final sitting down. 

But she is proud of her pain, she assures me. She explains to me that when something is harder on one than it is on others, God’s reward for them is even more bountiful. Similar to the one who pulls themselves away from their addiction in contrast to those who avoid substance entirely, and the one who finds the right path when they were never given guidance themselves to begin with, right there is also the one who prays even when they cannot do it in its entirety. 

My mom says she worships in the midst of her pain, not despite it. She has never missed a day of prayer in her life and she says she doesn’t think that she ever will.

“God gave me these legs,” she says. “He gave me these knees, this top of my foot, this broken bone.”

She says she will never give up on prayer, even if she is unable to do it in its full capacity, even if her foot will never heal. Instead, she molds it to fit her, she makes it into her own, she tries and tries to stand up even when at the end of the day she has to sit back down.

“Part of the worship is in trying,” she says.

At the end of this explanation, I am left somewhat in pieces. What sustains the human being if not this type of faith? How am I to make up for the things that I have done if my mother herself has already made peace with them? How did so much time pass before I noticed that as I was aging, my mother was too? Then I think about how even in asking her to provide this explanation to make myself feel less guilty, I am still taking.

Sometimes, at the end of the evening when I feel that I’m too tired to pick myself back up and my legs and joints are aching from the activities and movements of the day, I sit cross-legged on my bed and put my pillow on my lap, and I pray my Maghrib and Isha for that night sitting down. I lock my bedroom door because of the shame I feel at not wanting to stand up — rather than not being able to — and, in between the second and third repetition of my would-be prostration, I pray for God to forgive me for my tiredness in His presence. I ask for His mercy in my time of foolish insufficiency, and I pray for my parents to live long, happy lives. During this last appeal, I think about how my mom would pray standing up if she could. 

There are times when my mom tells me about how guilty she feels for all the wrongs she has committed over the course of her life, and each time, I’m met with the same mix of surprise and shame. They’re always small things, the things that she speaks about — things that you can’t even call sins. Small naiveties and mistakes she wasn’t able to avoid because she didn’t have a mother or father growing up to guide her; things that hurt her more than they hurt the people that she thinks she hurt. In those moments, I grab her face in both my hands and I laugh at her.

“Mama, you’re the first person going to Jannah,” I tell her (Jannah is the Arabic, Islamic word for Heaven, translating literally to “garden”). “When the time comes, you’re going to be sitting at the same table as the Prophet and feasting from the banquets of Heaven with his family.” 

And though I laugh, I want to cry, and I wonder, how do we ever forgive ourselves for the pain that we cause? Is it the same as the pain that forces us down when we would rather stand up? Where one day, we accept that we can’t reverse it anymore? Do we just simply accept that our bones and filaments, our tendons and ligaments, will one day become too slow for complete healing? 

My mom repents to God over and over for things she can’t change, for things I wish could be even one-fourth of the regrets that I hold. But when I try to think of how to fix her, how to somewhat equalize the burden I have given her, how to get her to stand up again, she smiles and tells me it is not my weight to hold.

Statement Correspondent Aya Fayad can be reached at ayafayad@umich.edu.

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