I Have Prayed To God Thrice Today And Thought Of Smoking A Cigarette Six Times

Woke with a mouth full of yesterday’s whiskey and the memory of the city pressing in through my window. Sunlight hitting the wall at a cruel angle. Three prayers this morning, six thoughts of a cigarette by ten a.m. Already lost count by eleven. By then, my spiritual ledger was a mess of red ink. Walked through the streets like a minor god in a cheap coat, thinking maybe the pavement would whisper some wisdom if I bent close enough. Nobody cared. Nobody ever does.

Shoved my hands in pockets, checked my phone, deleted three messages I didn’t mean to send, stared at shop windows as if the reflection could tell me why the world felt both absurd and holy. Somewhere between a bakery and a bus, I felt the sudden, distinct sensation of being a badly managed puppet. Prayed again. Thought of a cigarette again. Wine, water. Dilution. My own body betraying me with such precision that it almost felt elegant. Checked my pockets three times for a ghost-pack of Reds, then laughed at myself, loudly enough that a man feeding pigeons glared at me as if I’d just suggested the birds were made of cake and the melted wax of a jester’s votive candle.

Mama called at noon, just as I was midway through a particularly sophisticated thought about the transubstantiation of cheap cigarettes, “Are you eating?” she asked, her voice a soft, maternal needle popping the balloon of my transcendence.

“I’m contemplating the silence of God, Mama,” I said, leaning against a damp brick wall.

“You’re contemplating a hospital bill,” she replied back. “Eat some bread and butter. And stop that heavy breathing; it sounds like you’re rehearsing for a tragedy.”

I didn’t tell her that my tragedy was currently sponsored by Philip Morris. I just hung up and felt the weight of her pragmatism, a woman who views a well-made sandwich as the only reliable form of grace. To her, my ontological crisis is just a skipped breakfast and a poor choice in footwear. Which should be offensive, because these boots are the only part of my life I’ve actually managed to curate, and God knows a collapsing psyche looks much more intentional in a pointed toe.

By midday, I had, more or less, mentally catalogued every passerby’s shoes, the shapes of clouds I didn’t care about, and the fact that my stomach was demanding both sustenance and sin at the same time. I prayed again. Thought of a cigarette again. Water, wine. Dilution. Shook my own innkeeper’s hands as if that could make the mixture settle. Made a note to myself that the day had already decided its own absurdity and that I had no say in the matter.

By late afternoon, I am both saint and clown. It’s a specific kind of internal weather. Why do I simultaneously crave the Beatific Vision and a high-nicotine buzz? My body is less a temple and more a playground for contradictions where the monks and the gamblers are constantly brawling over the rent. Prayers versus cigarettes. Given knowledge versus attainable knowledge. I sat up and scribbled in my notebook: The eschaton, if it has a form, is surely the waiting room of my own skin. I was reminded of Aquinas. He makes a startling distinction in Summa Contra Gentiles regarding the purity of wisdom. He notes that in Scripture, secular wisdom is often represented by water, while divine wisdom is represented by wine. He upbraids the “innkeepers” for mixing the two, suggesting that to mingle philosophical doctrine with sacred doctrine is a method not permissible in the higher sciences. Yet here I am, the most dishonest bartender in the parish.

I find myself acting as the blameworthy innkeeper of my own spirit. If we follow his logic, my three prayers are the wine, the “given knowledge” granted by outer forces, while the aforementioned six thoughts of a cigarette are the water, the “attainable knowledge” manufactured by my own mind. I am taking the potent, sacrificial wine of my morning plea and diluting it with the mundane, secular water of my afternoon vices until the substance is unrecognizable. In other words I am diluting the sacred. If each science ought to proceed from its own principles, as the Philosopher suggests, then my day is a failed experiment in alchemy. I’m trying to turn a craving for tobacco into a state of grace and ending up with nothing but ash and bad Latin.

Aquinas notes that humans must rely on both “attainable knowledge” and “given knowledge”. I know the cigarette will kill me (attainable knowledge); I do not know why the prayer feels like shouting into a void (the mystery of given knowledge). There are three gaps of intellect. According to Aquinos, anyway.

The Human-Philosopher: Can understand the shape of a triangle. We know its vertices, its angles, and we can spin its material shape in our heads anyway we like because we know its substance and essence.

The Angels: Can perceive more of God because they are closer to the source, yet even their gaze cannot penetrate His body or look at His “insides”.

Deus: A God who is itself an intellect, knowing Himself to the fullest in a way the Angel cannot grasp.

The tragedy of this specific Tuesday is that I can picture the “insides” and the “essence” of the smoke perfectly; I know the geometry of the cigarette, the way the fire consumes the leaf, the way the static enters the lung. But God remains a substance I cannot penetrate. I am stuck in the massive gap of knowledge that exists between a philosopher and an angel, praying to a “body” whose essence remains unattainable to my own deduction.

In my poetry, I’m fond of saying things like “My body was a litany of saints who all forgot their lines,” because “My body is currently a vessel for three tablespoons of jarred pesto, a slice of mortadella and a desperate need for a stimulant” doesn’t have the same appeal. I am committed to the bit of being a “doomed” intellectual. The ratio of my day, the 3 to the 6, is basically a Dostoyevskian sitcom. You have to assume that if God is watching, He’s at least appreciative of the irony: I’ve asked for the salvation of my eternal soul three times, but I’ve checked my pockets for a lighter six times. It’s nice to know that even in my pursuit of the infinite, I remain remarkably easy to buy off with a bit of combustible paper. If there is no Divine Intellect, then the universe is just a cold, empty theater, and I am the only clown onstage performing a one-woman show titled The Virgin Mary Wants a Marlboro Red.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote about “The Look,” the moment you realize you are an object in someone else’s world. When I pray, I am auditioning to be an object in God’s world, to be seen by a Gaze that justifies my existence. When I think of a cigarette, I am just trying to be the protagonist of my own lung cancer. Maybe. Probably. The footnotes are still being debated.

I am haunted by St. Augustine’s “divided will,” one part of the soul reaching for the light, one tethered to the sweet, tender fruit of unreason. [Blank] once told me that “God doesn’t count the cigarettes you don’t smoke, but He definitely smells the ones you do.” A terrifying thought. It is a frantic state of being where I ask for the privilege to see tomorrow while simultaneously craving the very thing that threatens to shorten my time in it. My six thoughts of a cigarette are not just cravings; they are the “weight of my gravity,” pulling me toward the earth even as my three prayers attempt to simulate a “translation between realms”.

Again, I find myself repeating St. Augustine’s famous plea: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” There is a comfort in the “not yet.” It is the space between the fifth and sixth thought of a cigarette.

If the eschaton has a form, it is surely shaped like a waiting room. I am waiting for the “Anointed One” to descend, but I would settle for the “Messiah” simply being a version of myself that doesn’t crave a nicotine hit during the Rosary. A version of me that can get through the Gloria Patri without calculating the walking distance to the nearest bodega.

There is a branch of theology called Apophaticism, which posits that we can only approach the Divine by stripping away what He is not. God is not the light; He is the “Divine Darkness.” He is not the word; He is the “Absolute Silence.” In this framework, the three prayers I offered today were not conversations, but excavations. Attempts to hollow out enough space in my own chest to hold a Presence that refuses to be defined.

But the six thoughts of a cigarette are the opposite. They are Cataphatic. They are presence, they are smoke, they are “something” in a room that feels like “nothing.”

The frantic nature of my day arises from this friction: I am terrified of the “Divine Darkness” of the prayer, so I reach for the “Secular Light” of the match. I am a voyeur to my own intimacy with the void. To quote Simone Weil, “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”Perhaps the cravings are just my ego’s attempt to fill the void before God can get to it.

Anyways. I am currently editing this on my MacBook, eating cold pasta straight from the plastic and drinking a warm Coca-Cola that has lost its spirit. It is a pathetic, lukewarm communion. I am a holy nuisance, a Saint Sebastian picking at a hangnail, trying to decide what to title this. Does ‘The Holy Ghost Who Is A Chain Smoker’ have a ring to it? Eh, who cares? Let the theologians sort it out.

I have prayed thrice. I have wanted to smoke six times. I am still here, sitting in the gap between the philosopher and the angel, waiting for the wine to stop tasting like water.