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My father has been gone for over ten years now. Lately, he has been visiting me in the spaces between my thoughts — in the soft ache of memory, in the warm flash of his smile, in the quiet moments when I realize I’m turning something over in my mind the same way he used to turn a rosary bead between his fingers. And in the questions, I didn’t know were still alive in me.
Catholicism formed the backdrop of my childhood — the stained glass, the incense, the rhythm of prayers repeated until they imprinted themselves into the body. Yet even as a child, something in me resisted the rigidity, the unquestioned rules. My spirit tilted toward the edges, toward what lived just beyond the lines drawn for me.
I left the Church long ago, at least in practice. But I never abandoned the part of me that believed in God. If anything, my connection to the Divine has only grown more intimate, less governed by doctrine, more shaped by the unfiltered experience of being alive.
I pray, but not from a pew.
I worship, but not according to anyone else’s script.
I’m no longer a Catholic, but I am profoundly connected to God through myself and my practices..
And yet, sometimes, I feel my father beside me, yes, the Catholic father of ritual and rosaries. And the other man whose quiet faith shaped my sense of the sacred long before I had language for it.
Lately, when I meditate, each breath feels like a bead between my fingers, each exhale a turning of the prayer wheel.
Where the First Seed Was Planted
People often assume Tantra came into my life in adulthood, as if it appeared suddenly and swept me into a new world. But the truth is, the seed was planted much earlier.
I remember watching Sting and his wife on The Mike Douglas Show — our little black-and-white TV humming as they sat side by side, radiating a connection so palpable my young body felt it.
Douglas asked them the secret to their marriage.
Before answering, they shared a look — intimate, alive, unmistakably charged. It was as if a current passed between them.
Sting slid his hand into hers and said simply:
“Tantra.”
Douglas looked scandalized.
“Can we talk about that on TV?” he whispered.
Sting chuckled, holding up his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.
“Sex is about this much of Tantra,” he said in a husky voice.
“The rest… is a way of life. A way of knowing yourself and your partner — from the moment you meet to every stage of the relationship.”
Douglas nervously changed the subject, but something in me shifted.
A spark.
A knowing.
An unnamed door opening. A longing to know myself through the lens of Tantra.
I didn’t walk through that door until much later, about fifteen years ago, when my life, body, longing, and spiritual hunger finally aligned.
When I did, it wasn’t a single step.
It was a spiral.
A return.
A remembering.
The Prayer Wheel My Father Built
Around the same time I stepped deeper into Tantra, something else from my past resurfaced — something my father practiced during the last fifteen or so years of his life. He called it “the prayer wheel.”
It wasn’t a literal wheel.
It was a worldview.
A devotion.
He placed everyone he loved on it:
- his wife
- his children
- grandchildren
- siblings
- nieces and nephews
- friends
- people he met briefly on the street
But he also included what he called “the most important people on the wheel.”
Not the beloved ones.
The difficult ones.
The people he didn’t like or trust.
The ones who had hurt him or someone he loved.
World leaders, he disagreed with.
Anyone who stirred something unresolved in him.
On the wheel, there was no hierarchy.
Just a circle.
Everyone held equally.
Every morning, he would sit, close his eyes, “spin the wheel,” and whoever it landed on — one person, two, or three — received his full, sincere prayer.
My father was rigid in many of his religious beliefs.
But he was not rigid in who deserved his prayers.
There was something quietly radical in that.
Something I didn’t fully understand then, but do much better now.
The Day He Closed the Bible
In the last years of his life, my father volunteered at a nearby prison in a program where community members met with inmates to read and discuss the teachings of Jesus.
One day, mid-reading, a man interrupted him:
“No disrespect, Mr. Mark, but I don’t really give a fuck about Jesus.
I just signed up to get the afternoon off.”
My father paused, closed the Bible, and said:
“My name is Jack.
What do you want to talk about?”
Scripture gave way to humanity.
They talked about life, fear, family, choices, and possibilities.
Not salvation.
Not doctrine.
Just two human beings meeting in truth.
They talked every week after that.
Whenever I think of the rigid parts of my father, I remember this moment.
By closing that Bible, he spoke more of Jesus than any verse ever could.
He added that inmate to his prayer wheel the next day.
Building My Own Prayer Wheel
Maybe this is why, in my own life now, I feel called to build a prayer wheel of my own.
It looks different — of course it does.
My prayers are rooted in Tantra, in breath, in awareness, in the body’s wisdom, in energy, and concentration rather than recitation. And, deep in my roots are the ritual and faith of my upbringing as well. Still there, but not as a set of rules, but as part of the blocks of the sparks of my own longing for a path that felt aligned with who I am and want to continue to evolve into.
Catholicism taught me about devotion.
Tantra taught me about embodiment.
My father taught me how to listen for God in the quiet places.
What I’ve learned is that nothing is wasted.
No spiritual path is ever truly abandoned.
It simply becomes part of the wheel.
Faith, longing, breath, memory — all of it turns.
All of it becomes prayer.
Sometimes, when I sit in meditation, I can still feel the rhythm of his rosary in my bones — not the doctrine, but the devotion. Not the rules, but the reaching.
And I wonder if maybe he prayed the same way I do now,
not to be told what to believe,
but to feel less alone in the world.
Maybe that’s what the prayer wheel has always been for.
Not a mechanism for salvation,
but a way of touching the Divine
one breath, one bead, one moment at a time. The intention is the same.
A concentrated offering of love toward another human being.
And I’m beginning to understand something my father must have learned long before I did:
It’s easy to pray for the ones we love.
The others — not so much.
But can I pray for?
- The man who cut me off in traffic?
- The neighbor who grates on my nerves?
- The family member whose presence never aligns with my longing?
- The men who hurt me when I was 18 and innocent?
- The bullies threaded through my past?
I’m finding that I actually can.
And something surprising is happening.
The edges of anger, resentment, and angst begin to soften.
Not always disappearing, not yet, maybe not ever.
But that’s not the point of the wheel.
The point isn’t resolution with them.
The point is liberation within me.
The Tantric Heart of the Prayer Wheel: Moksha
In Tantra, the spiritual purpose of life is moksha:
- liberation from samsara, the endless loops we get stuck in
- freedom from karmic bondage, not punishment, but patterns
- unity with the Divine, perceiving God everywhere
- one of the four great aims of human life
Moksha isn’t about forgiving someone to absolve them.
It’s about releasing the internal knot that binds me to suffering.
It’s about removing the hook.
Dissolving the resistance.
Ending the spin of the painful wheel so the sacred one can turn.
By placing the difficult ones on my wheel, I am reclaiming myself.
I am stepping out of samsara — not through avoidance,
but through devotion.
Not devotion to them.
Devotion to love.
Devotion to freedom.
Devotion to my own awakening.
I didn’t understand this when my father was alive.
I understand it now.
Faith, Tantra, and the Circles We Inherit
My spiritual path has spiraled far from where it began,
Maybe that’s the nature of circles.
We return not to the same point,
but to the same essence,
with new wisdom.
My father prayed with rosary beads.
I pray with breath and intention.
He prayed through rules he believed in.
I pray through a freedom I fought to claim.
He spun a wheel.
Now I do too.
Different wheels.
Same center.
Same devotion.
Same love.
The love that is truly the most powerful energy in the world and beyond.
The same turning of the heart toward the Divine
in whatever form we can bear.
Why I’m Sharing This Now
Grief is strange. It doesn’t leave — it changes shape.
Where it once felt like a wound, it now feels like a doorway. A part of me will always miss my father. But, these days the missing is a softer feeling inside me, it’s a place I can meet myself, my father, all the people that have passed on. I meet that place in me that longs for connection with love, in memory, in meditation, in the quiet rituals I didn’t know I inherited.
Tantra has opened me to the truth that God is not separate from us,
and neither are the people we have loved.
Everything is still here.
Everything is still turning.
This is my prayer wheel.
This is my offering.
And in some way, I hope it brings him closer — not back to life, but back into the lineage of love that guides me forward.
Roars of love,
Jennifer
