The punk singer Patti Smith learned to say her prayers when she was a child, and she was still saying them forty years later, the night her friend and former lover Robert Mapplethorpe died in a hospital room in New York City. Smith was at home outside Detroit. “I drew the blanket over the baby in her crib, kissed my son as he slept, then lay down beside my husband and said my prayers,” she writes. “He is still alive, I remember whispering.” These are simple observations, but what Smith has to say about prayer in Just Kids, her memoir of Mapplethorpe and herself and their emergence together as artists in the late 60s, is anything but simple. A Jehovah’s Witness as a child, Smith is a famously blasphemous singer who declared in the first line of her first album “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” and punctuated a recitation of Psalm 23 in her song “Privilege (Set Me Free)” with “oh damn, goddamn, goddamn.” Yet she has written a book that is as much about prayer as about a passionate friendship—or, better, about passionate friendship conceived through prayer.
Constance M. Furey
Constance M. Furey is associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. A co-founder of the Initiative for the Humanistic Study of Innovation, she has authored a book on the Religious Republic of Letters in early modern Europe published by Cambridge University Press. Recent work includes an article, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies”, available here; a forthcoming essay on religious discernment as a form of critique; and a book project about how devotional poems by John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer and others reconceived human relationships as they crafted new forms of intimacy with God.