The Agnostic Prayer of Forgiveness

I cannot take credit for the following. Instead, it is a product of that departed talent Roger Zelazny, he who crafted Lord of Light and The Chronicles of Amber. It is his idea of what a priest of agnostics might deliver as a rite of forgiveness before death:

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.

Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit.

I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.

This quote is taken from the third chapter of Zelazny's 1969 book, Creatures of Light and Darkness. It conceals in itself many interesting ideas about our relationship with the supernatural.

Meteorology

It rains again. It rains on the just and the unjust. It precipitates on all. This is the time of the monsoon. And as one master story-teller began his tale:

It was the season of rains...

It was well into the time of the great wetness...

It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night.

The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday.

Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique, but the machine had been built and operated by Yama-Dharma, fallen, of the Celestial City; and, it was told, he had ages ago built the mighty thunder-chariot of Lord Shiva: that engine that fled across the heavens belching gouts of fire in its wake.

These lines, of course, come from Roger Zelazny's epic 1967 novel, often said to have been his best, Lord of Light. And right now, as I surf the wet net, reading about the mundane complaints of men against water and foreign imports and longevity-mad emperors, I think about the sense of wonder we used to have, all mushed up and shredding into the flood like discarded tissue paper.

There is so little left to withstand the storm. It is not so much revival that we need, but growth. You do not plant saplings every few years as a defence against erosion; you nurture saplings into mighty trees with roots that dig deep. And to do that, you have to feed them well.