As part of “Believing,” The New York Times asked several writers to explore a significant moment in their religious or spiritual lives.
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It was a listless day, one without any signs of doom. Then, as evening approached, I got a call.
On a beach here in Lagos, Nigeria, a huge wave had swept my friend, Fola Francis, away. She hadn’t been found. As I got in a cab, I did with intention something I would usually do absent-mindedly, sometimes without much focus: I prayed.
I prayed as I made frantic calls to see if a dive service could look for her. The man on the line told me in a flat tone that it was too late in the day to send a search party. Nothing could be done until the next morning. My shouts in response splintered. I choked on my words. Nothing changed. I kept praying; that someone would call me to say they had found her alive; that this time, she would be the one to pick up the phone.
Prayer has always been my bulwark against the casual brutality of life. I was raised Pentecostal. As I grew up, I attended seven-day prayer crusades in Ilorin, Nigeria, with my mother, who prayed all the time. I remember her hunched slightly, her hair wrapped in a red scarf, mouthing her words. Even after my oldest sister died, she never lost faith. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to hear her whispering, though the words were indecipherable. When I began living in Lagos, I went at least once a month to vigils, long, all-night services where my sister and I prayed in a charged display of devotion. We shook with the spirit, spoke in tongues.
In the space of a few years, I lost another sibling, and soon after both my parents passed. With each death, my faith wavered, but I continued to find comfort in prayer. Even after I left my church (being queer, I didn’t feel I could be myself there), I kept my prayers — and the unshaken belief that there is a God, a universal guide, of sorts — with me.
Now, I pray in motion. I pray as I walk, or in the middle of a workout. I often pray without kneeling, or clasping my hands. I engage in a sort of conversation with God, sometimes in my head, other times out loud. I pick up where I had left off, as if the conversation had only been paused.
When something good happens, I tell God I am grateful. When I am hoping for something, I remind God that he knows how much it would mean to me. When something bad happens, I ask questions.
The day after she disappeared, I took a cab to Fola Francis’ apartment.
On that ride, I prayed in silence. The drive was long and the Lagos sun was searing, unmitigated by early December’s harmattan, the Saharan winds that can chill the city as they roll south across the desert. Christmas decorations hung in front of stores and malls. When the cab was stuck in traffic, hawkers pressed close to the window and urged me to buy a pair of glasses, or some roasted cashews, packed in repurposed plastic water bottles. Lagos was still Lagos; things had fallen apart for me, but the city carried on.
I closed my eyes and imagined another outcome. I made my prayers nuanced, etched them with detail. If I could made it real to me, I thought, it might be equally real to God.
I imagined Fola’s apartment; as a trans woman in Nigeria it had been her haven. She had decorated her room, though tiny, with the things that meant the most to her. I prayed that I would enter and find her sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. She would smile, and we would make a joke of our ordeal.
Instead, I found our friends in the living room. Also waiting. Also calling around, searching for answers. Negotiating with hope.
I was still searching for answers during a last ride, the final one. My friends and I were on a boat, on our way to identify the body we learned had washed up at the beach. On a different day we would have been blasting music and drinking; instead, we were mostly quiet. We only asked necessary questions: When do we get there, and what do we do if the body is in fact hers?
We don’t discuss how this will change us, what we will become. For our large group of friends, Fola Francis had been a glue. And still, as I watched the grayish Lagos lagoon crash against the boat, I prayed — that the body was not hers, or that someone would find her wandering on the beach and bring her home, alive.
The day was perfect, the sky offensively blue, the sun high but lenient on the skin. I thought of how this would have been a good day to come to the beach, to lie on the balcony of a beach house and stare out over the Atlantic Ocean. When the body was confirmed as hers, my mind went quiet. The moment was still, cold, precise. Final. I stopped hoping. I returned to asking questions. “Why have you let this happen?” I asked God. “Did I not pray hard enough?”
In the days that followed, I avoided my friends. When we convened, I often left quickly. Her death carried the firmness of a slap. A biting rejection. My request hadn’t been answered. And that stung. I had always trusted that prayer would help me.
Still, like my mother, for the rest of that dreadful December I prayed. I asked for small things; that I would wake up to find my heart no longer aching; and that my friends and I would get through Christmas. That I would find some peace, or at least the strength to search for it.
I never asked God to give me comfort, though. I realize now that I didn’t need to. Through the act of prayer itself, that wish had already been granted.
Nelson C.J is a writer and cultural curator currently living in Lagos and working on a novel about grief.
