[Editor’s Note: This post is in response to Real Presences: Catholic Prayer as Intersubjectivity, Robert Orsi’s portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

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.

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