Prayers Written At Vailima(维利马# 祈祷)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 36.79KB 18 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Prayers Written At Vailima

Prayers Written At

Vailima

Robert Louis Stevenson

Prayers Written At Vailima

INTRODUCTION

In every Samoan household the day is closed with prayer and the

singing of hymns. The omission of this sacred duty would indicate, not

only a lack of religious training in the house chief, but a shameless

disregard of all that is reputable in Samoan social life. No doubt, to many,

the evening service is no more than a duty fulfilled. The child who says

his prayer at his mother's knee can have no real conception of the meaning

of the words he lisps so readily, yet he goes to his little bed with a sense of

heavenly protection that he would miss were the prayer forgotten. The

average Samoan is but a larger child in most things, and would lay an

uneasy head on his wooden pillow if he had not joined, even perfunctorily,

in the evening service. With my husband, prayer, the direct appeal, was a

necessity. When he was happy he felt impelled to offer thanks for that

undeserved joy; when in sorrow, or pain, to call for strength to bear what

must be borne.

Vailima lay up some three miles of continual rise from Apia, and more

than half that distance from the nearest village. It was a long way for a

tired man to walk down every evening with the sole purpose of joining in

family worship; and the road through the bush was dark, and, to the

Samoan imagination, beset with supernatural terrors. Wherefore, as soon

as our household had fallen into a regular routine, and the bonds of

Samoan family life began to draw us more closely together, Tusitala felt

the necessity of including our retainers in our evening devotions. I suppose

ours was the only white man's family in all Samoa, except those of the

missionaries, where the day naturally ended with this homely, patriarchal

custom. Not only were the religious scruples of the natives satisfied, but,

what we did not foresee, our own respectability - and incidentally that of

our retainers - became assured, and the influence of Tusitala increased

tenfold.

After all work and meals were finished, the 'pu,' or war conch, was

sounded from the back veranda and the front, so that it might be heard by

all. I don't think it ever occurred to us that there was any incongruity in the

Prayers Written At Vailima

use of the war conch for the peaceful invitation to prayer. In response to its

summons the white members of the family took their usual places in one

end of the large hall, while the Samoans - men, women, and children -

trooped in through all the open doors, some carrying lanterns if the

evening were dark, all moving quietly and dropping with Samoan

decorum in a wide semicircle on the floor beneath a great lamp that hung

from the ceiling. The service began by my son reading a chapter from the

Samoan Bible, Tusitala following with a prayer in English, sometimes

impromptu, but more often from the notes in this little book, interpolating

or changing with the circumstance of the day. Then came the singing of

one or more hymns in the native tongue, and the recitation in concert of

the Lord's Prayer, also in Samoan. Many of these hymns were set to

ancient tunes, very wild and warlike, and strangely at variance with the

missionary words.

Sometimes a passing band of hostile warriors, with blackened faces,

would peer in at us through the open windows, and often we were forced

to pause until the strangely savage, monotonous noise of the native drums

had ceased; but no Samoan, nor, I trust, white person, changed his reverent

attitude. Once, I remember a look of surprised dismay crossing the

countenance of Tusitala when my son, contrary to his usual custom of

reading the next chapter following that of yesterday, turned back the

leaves of his Bible to find a chapter fiercely denunciatory, and only too

applicable to the foreign dictators of distracted Samoa. On another

occasion the chief himself brought the service to a sudden check. He had

just learned of the treacherous conduct of one in whom he had every

reason to trust. That evening the prayer seemed unusually short and formal.

As the singing stopped he arose abruptly and left the room. I hastened

after him, fearing some sudden illness. 'What is it?' I asked. 'It is this,' was

the reply; 'I am not yet fit to say, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive

those who trespass against us."'

It is with natural reluctance that I touch upon the last prayer of my

husband's life. Many have supposed that he showed, in the wording of this

prayer, that he had some premonition of his approaching death. I am sure

he had no such premonition. It was I who told the assembled family that I

Prayers Written At Vailima

felt an impending disaster approaching nearer and nearer. Any Scot will

understand that my statement was received seriously. It could not be, we

thought, that danger threatened any one within the house; but Mr. Graham

Balfour, my husband's cousin, very near and dear to us, was away on a

perilous cruise. Our fears followed the various vessels, more or less

unseaworthy, in which he was making his way from island to island to the

atoll where the exiled king, Mataafa, was at that time imprisoned. In my

husband's last prayer, the night before his death, he asked that we should

be given strength to bear the loss of this dear friend, should such a sorrow

befall us.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PrayersWrittenAtVailima1PrayersWrittenAtVailimaRobertLouisStevensonPrayersWrittenAtVailima2INTRODUCTIONIneverySamoanhouseholdthedayisclosedwithprayerandthesingingofhymns.Theomissionofthissacreddutywouldindicate,notonlyalackofreligioustraininginthehousechief,butashamelessdisregardofallthatisreputable...

展开>> 收起<<

Prayers Written At Vailima(维利马# 祈祷).pdf

共18页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Prayers Written At Vailima(维利马# 祈祷)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: