The Pocket Oxford Book of Prayer: a review

Readers may be puzzled to see this week what appears to be a re-run of a piece that appeared in this column a month or two ago. Owing to a consolidated muddle by myself and thepost office, only the first part of the piece appeared. So now here are both parts together, giving you the opportunity to read some of my golden words of wisdom a second time, followed by material that is new to you. My focus is the relationship between the language of poetry and the language of prayer. The Oxford University Press is one of the oldest and greatest publishing houses in the world (and I don’t make that claim merely because I am an Oxford graduate, and old, and slightly great). The Pocket Oxford Book of Prayer was first published in 1989, edited by George Appleton, who also composed some of the prayers. The contents come from numerous denominations, though a large proportion are, as one would expect, from the Anglican Church. There are also prayers from other faiths, including a surah from the Qu’ran. There is at least one touch of humour in the book. In a section on prayers relating to the Eucharist, Appleton juxtaposes two quotations from the Oxford philosopher of language A.J. Ayer. The first: “What could be more ridiculous than the Eucharist?” The second: “I could be wrong. I’m not omniscient.” One of the prayers that has special significance for your columnist and his left-wing views is by Appleton and has to do with good works, with the belief that we are here on earth in large part to struggle to make it better (as of now, we appear not to be making a very good job of this). The prayer concludes: “Accept our compassion for our fellow-men, / our desire for their relief,/ . . . Help us to help thee complete thy universe, / O creator Father, / to remove its flaws, / so that we may be sub-creators with thee of the / Kingdom of thy love in Jesus Christ.” For why were we made so able, if not to take on such a task? There are quite a few poems from Africa and I want to focus on these. They chime in well with what I was saying some months ago about the language of poetry used in the service of prayer. The first two are both built from metaphor (broadly speaking, the art of saying something by saying something else that images or conveys the sense of what one has in mind). Many proverbs work on metaphor: for example, a favourite of mine from Nigeria, which might be applied to the Lesotho parliament, with its constant defections and floor-crossing: “when the axe first came into the forest, the oldest and wisest tree said ‘Beware! The handle was once one of us.’” The first of the African prayers I want to quote is from “an African schoolgirl” and reads: “O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling-place.” The other is from “a Nigerian Christian”: “God in Heaven, you have helped my life to grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried from the tree one twig of his choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling-place and was living in it. Tonight, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.” Another prayer built up from metaphor (though it is not, as far as I can tell, from Africa) is “A Muslim’s first prayer as a Christian”, (and I assure my readers that I am fully aware of the controversies that have to do with conversion, especially when this is compelled). This begins “O God, I am Mustafa the tailor and I work at the shop of Muhammad Ali. The whole day long I sit and pull the needle and the thread through the cloth. O God, you are the needle and I am the thread.” With considerable ingenuity and sensitivity the metaphor is extended for another eight lines. There is a prayer for chanting from the DRC, with the refrain “Strike the chords upon the drum” and a prayer from Kenya that is built upon the poetic technique of parallelism (repetition with variation). This reads: “From the cowardice that dare not face new truth / From the laziness that is contented with half truth / From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, / Good Lord, deliver me.” This reminded me immediately of the struggle recorded by the late Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina in composing his autobiography One Day I Will Write About This Place, a book that explores the problems involved in discerning the truth, facing up to it, doing it justice. The collection also includes a Mende poem from Sierra Leone and one from the Dinka people of Sudan. The former is a prayer to the ancestors, reflecting a belief system that has often been rejected by Christian churches that were blind to the possibilities of syncretism. There is, finally an excerpt from Leopold Sedar Senghor’s long poem “Prayer for Peace.” Senghor is best known as one of the founders of the Negritude movement, the guiding tenets of which were controversial, especially (though this doesn’t apply to all the Negritude poets – certainly not to David Diop) in its refusal of armed resistance to colonialism and its failure to foresee the damage to be done by neocolonialism (Wole Soyinka once quipped about Negritude “a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It just pounces”). Viewed outside of that sticky context the poem is quite lovely, speaking of the peoples of the world and asking “grant to their warm hands that they may clasp / The earth in a girdle of brotherly hands, / Beneath the rainbow of their peace.” A book to treasure, and I do encourage my readers to get hold of it. You can carry it wherever you go, as the title suggests – in your coat or jacket or blouse pocket. And whip it out whenever the call comes. Chris Dunton