Before I was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half ago, prayer was dimly on my radar. As I entered college, the space created inside me by the silence of all those Quaker meetings began to fill with spiritual longing, a yearning to connect with all the luscious divine energy. As I started studying yoga and Eastern spiritualities, a Rumi line wound its way into me: “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” The idea that prayer could be as free and passionate as falling in love was reassuring.

I realised I could pray just fine as long as I was speaking to a female form of divinity or a gender-free source of luminous divine love. Then I could connect; I could feel the love pouring through me like the fresh coconut water I drank from the nut. I read an Anne Lamott quote that stuck: the two best ways to pray are “help me, help me, help me” and “thank you, thank you, thank you.” I used it again and again.

But after moving back to my hometown of New York City, prayer fell away in exchange for shopping and financial survival. But when I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma five years later at age 31, everything kind of stopped. I can’t say that I did the classic thing of getting on my knees and begging for help. I think I had been steeped in New Age thinking long enough to feel like the help was there, that I just needed to receive it as best I could and trust that the message of this illness would get to me-without doing me in. — Beliefnet.com