Rochefort reads the funeral service for a crew member:
"'- Father, unto You in whatever form he did dream You, we commit this being our comrade; and we pray that You grant him rest, even as we pray for ourselves. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.'
"The gruesome little flashes overhead were dying away." (p. 543)
The flashes overhead are explosions in the space battle. Their dying away reads like a response to the prayer for mercy.
In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, all gods, including the God of the Covenant, begin in the Dreaming and emerge into the land where they are worshiped but eventually return to the Dreaming, then enter the realm of Death and after that complete nonexistence. See Where Do Gods Go?
Sometimes pluralist societies find non-denominational ways to refer to the transcendent. Thus:
"'Stand by. The Divine, in whatever form It manifests Itself to you, the Divine is with us.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER FIVE, p. 261.
In this formulation, the Divine is not dreamed but manifests Itself and has an impersonal pronoun.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The text Rochefort recited was plainly written by the Terran Navy to apply as widely as possible to an institution with personnel from many species. Centuries later we see Flandry doing the same for the burial of one of his crewmen in THE REBEL WORLDS.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Unfortunately we are not told the words that Flandry reads, only that they are "majestic," so I had imagined something like a Royal Navy funeral service.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I thought of that, re Flandry. And I did wonder if the British Navy had a special "non denominational" burial service or used the Anglican text.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: IIRC, traditionally the Anglican service was used. I'm not sure what the current practice is.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I did wonder. I assume, for Catholic Naval personnel, if a Catholic chaplain is present, the service of their own faith would be used.
And I would like to have seen more of the burial rite read aloud by Rochefort and Flandry.
Ad astra! Sean
Working as a Careers Officer/Careers Adviser, I had contact with the British Armed Forces. They seemed curiously behind the times in some ways. Someone who spoke to us mentioned Sunday chapel services, then clearly thought that he had covered all the bases just by adding, "Catholics go to their own, of course." The rest of us present were conscious of living in a society encompassing more than just two kinds of Christians.
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