where prayer has been valid

-
-
This is very cool. A copy of the Book of Psalms was found in a bog in Ireland, and it may go back to 800-1000 AD. That's old. Even on European standards (although not in Middle Eastern ones).

The find reminds me of literature. First, I am reminded of part of The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (no surprise). Eliot writes that,

"...You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiousity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
where prayer has been valid. ..."

I attend an Anglican church, and some of the other American attendees get frustrated with the liturgy ("Then why are they attending an Anglican church?" you ask. So do I.) I so appreciate the words of the liturgy, and the churches and cathedrals of Europe because they are places--physical and literary--where people have prayed before me. These are places where for over a thousand years people have gathered to worship God. These are places were prayer has been valid.

In Annie Dillard's words: "I often think of the set pieces of the liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed."

So many believers in the evangelical movement (which I am a part of) discount, or are unaware of, the blessing of heritage. They see the very real misbehavior and outright sin of our ancestors and they throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, the people who worshipped in these cathedrals, who used this liturgy, who read this Irish psalm book did some horrible things. They were involved with the Crusades, with genocide, with slavery, with violence of every kind. They messed up. Royally.

In a few hundred years, our progeny will look back and shake their heads at us, just as we shake ours at those who came before us. With their 20/20 hindsight, they will very rightly point out massive failings that we, in the midst of our politics and our cultures, don't see.

But despite our failings, our sins, our blindness, we are praying. And our prayers are valid. And I would be honored if someone hundreds of years from now found my Bible, my prayer book, my poetry, and used them to pray--if they considered the "places" I pray to be a path for them as well.

On another note, I am also reminded of Seamus Heaney's bog poems. One of which is...

Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and sweet.
The ground itself is kind sweet butter

Melting and opening underfoot
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

Again, I am reminded that everywhere you step in Europe, someone has been before. This may be true in America as well, but we still believe that we can go somewhere, do something, be someone--totally new. We can buck the system. We can change the world. Europeans walk on 1,000-year-old streets, live in 100-year-old homes and truly believe that there is nothing new under the sun. They have no big praries. No untamed forests. But "the wet centre is bottomless," and their pioneers who strike "inwards and downwards," and are no less adventurers than those who go "onward and upward."

Fare forward, voyagers, and keep digging.