MICHAEL COREN
There is power in prayer

I seldom write explicitly about my religious faith in my column.* What happened to me recently, however, simply has to be told.

My sister Stephanie is six years older and lives in Britain. We never really got on. We argued. A lot. Steph also argued with my parents. A lot.

Steph had a daughter Tessa, but her marriage had broken down. After the collapse, Steph had some dreadful rows with her family. After one particularly venomous episode, she cut off all contact. Neither she nor her daughter, whom my parents had partly raised, would speak to any of us again.

This was all some years ago. In the meantime, I married a Canadian and came here to live. It wasn’t so bad for me, but it was horrible for my parents. Steph got married again and had a second child. Now there were two grandchildren living in Britain, and Mum and Dad could see neither of them.

In fact, one of them they had never seen at all.

As the years went by, the tears dried up, and a dark resignation replaced the feverish anguish. A scab formed over the wound. I tried to make contact with Steph, but I didn’t know her new married name. It’s hard to trace someone without their name. We didn’t even know in which town she lived.

Five years ago, I became a Christian. Which means I pray. Have to, want to. It’s a conversation with my Maker, a process partly of speaking but mostly of listening. I rarely pray for tangibles, although I am fully aware that all prayers are answered, even if the answer is sometimes in the negative.

But one day, for some reason, I felt the need to ask God to repair the bloody tear between my parents and my sister. Just a short plea. Then I forgot about it.

A week later, the telephone rings. It’s Mum, in her wonderful Cockney accent that makes me feel warm and safe. “Mike,” she says. “You’re not going to believe this. I’ve got a letter here from Stephanie.” A long pause. “She says she wants to make up, to meet.”

I listen, hardly registering what is being said.

“I don’t know what to do,” Mum continues. “I’m frightened of starting all the pain again.”

My sister has not spoken to my parents in 15 years. Suddenly I pray for a resolution. My mother receives a letter from my sister four days later, meaning she almost certainly wrote it the same day I asked for help.

There is a phone number on the letter. I call it. A man answers. “Is Steph there?” I ask.

He wants to know who it is. I hear him tell Stephanie, and I hear her saying my name over and over again, as though if she stops I will no longer be there. She is crying, almost hysterically. Between gulps for air, she asks me why I didn’t make contact earlier. I tell her I didn’t know how to. Why, I respond, didn’t she contact me?

Because, she explains, she kept hearing we all hated her. When I ask her who said this, she can’t remember, almost as though the thought was implanted.

I then ask why she decided to break the silence.

“Because I heard that Dad was very ill and I just couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t spoken to him.”

At this point, I choke a little. “But Steph, he’s fine. He’s not ill at all.” Again, a thought implanted – this time from an entirely different source.

We chat, laugh, cry. Then I say to her that I must reveal something that is very important. I tell her that on a specific date some years ago I became a Christian.

She doesn’t answer at first. Then she asks me to repeat the date.

“Mike,” she says, her voice shaking. “So did I. So did I.”

Mum, Dad, Steph, her husband John, Tessa and little Katie went on vacation to Spain together last month. They had a wonderful time. And they weren’t the only ones smiling.

Michael Coren is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster. He hosts the “Michael Coren Live” TV program on CTS and radio’s The Michael Coren Show on CFRB; writes a weekly column for the Toronto Sun; and is the author of eight books.