On Yet Another Beach II

See On Yet Another Beach.

In A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XVI, Kossara prays behind a boulder far down the beach from the ychan fisher village of Nanteiwon which looks small between gray sea and sky. Is it somehow appropriate to pray in such an intermediate place, between sky, sea and land?

Kossara lost her parents, two brothers and a sister in the attack on the Vymezal estate. She, who will later be canonized, asks the Father of Creation to receive them, Jesus to absolve them, Mary to comfort them and the light of the Holy Spirit to shine upon them.

Is it irreverent to compare this prayer with others? Prayers are expressions of aspiration and goodwill. One view is that, to be efficacious, they must be addressed to a specific named deity. Another view is that Someone hears every prayer...:

"He has different names in every country (for he is worshipped in different forms and in many tongues, but it is always Odin they worship)."

-Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (London, 2018), p. 2.

 

When Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, trains the disguised James Bond to pose as Japanese, Bond must offer a prayer to the sun goddess. Watched by two Shinto priests and surrounded by other supplicants, he approaches the shrine, bows, tosses a coin, claps his hands, bends his head, claps again, bows again and withdraws. When he admits that he did not make any prayer because he was concentrating on remembering the sequence of motions, Tanaka replies that the goddess will help him to concentrate more in future. Does Tanaka believe that this is literally true? Does Bond refrain from expressing skepticism out of diplomacy? (He is indeed in the Diplomatic Section and on a diplomatic mission, no longer 007 but now 7777.) The pagan view is that belief does not matter.