Your Will

The People Of The Wind, XV.

Philippe Rochefort must choose between keeping his word to Tabitha Falkayn and doing what he thinks is right. He prays:

"- O all you saints, St. Joan who burned for her people, help me!" (p. 610)

"Father, show me Your will." (p. 611)

Rochefort is a Jerusalem Catholic. (Scroll down.)

Human children become self-conscious individuals, persons, by interacting linguistically with other human beings.

Jews, Christians and other theists believe that all human life is a dialogue with a transcendent person - or persons, just to complicate matters. Some of us think that this belief is a projection of social interactions onto natural and (hypothetical) supernatural interactions but theistic language is strongly embedded. I spontaneously think, "Lord!" when I contemplate my own wrong actions and their consequences.

"'I may be addressing it to nothing but a sort of cosmic Dead Letter Office, but that can't be helped. The message itself is plain. It has got to read:
"'To Whom it may concern: Thy will, not mine.'"
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), CHAPTER TEN, p. 104.

I endorse this agnostic prayer to:

Whatever gods may be
-copied from here.

(For any readers of this blog who may be interested, analysis of Dornford Yates' novels continues here.)