For "Star of the Sea," see A Prayer and Devotion. In fact, here is the entire prayer, which I do not seem to have quoted in full before:
"Mary, mother of God, mother of sorrows, mother of salvation, be with us now and at the hour of our death.
"Westward we sail, but night overtakes us. Watch over us through the dark and bring us on into day. Grant that this our ship bear the most precious of cargoes, your blessing.
"Pure as yourself, your evenstar shines above the sunset. Guide us by your light. Lay your gentleness on the seas, breathe us forward in our faring and home again to our loves, carry us at last by your prayers into Heaven.
"Ave Stella Maris!"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 467-640 AT IV, pp. 639-640.
We enter imaginatively into such a prayer in a work of fiction even if we cannot also do so while kneeling in a church. And the same is true of the Prayer of Bodin's Return - see here.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And, of course, Bodin Miyatovich and Flandry's prayers shows both Anderson's respect for honest believers in the first and what makes me think was at least a possible wish to believe in the second. But, in his later works I can't help but wonder if texts like "Prayer In War" (to be found in ORION SHALL RISE and the Marian prayer composed by Anderson in "Star Of The Sea" shows him coming closer to actual belief.
I think Anderson was one of the few science fiction writers of his generation to treat religious and philosophical questions seriously. Of course some other writers of his generation in the field handled such sensitively, such as James Blish, Anthony Boucher, the tragic Walter Miller, Julian May, etc.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and I think Arthur Clarke seldom or never tried to address such matters. The painfully fake and unconvincing "Religion of Science" Asimov shows us in FOUNDATION simply can't be taken seriously. It was merely an instrument created by the Mayor of Termius, Salvor Hardin, as a cynical instrument for controlling the neo-barbarian kingdoms which broke away from the dying First Galactic Empire.
Sean
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