Religious motifs : Overview. Search. About religious motifs
The motif Prayer is a part of: Ritual
Keywords:
Faith, speech, words, ritual
Prayers in a religious sense of the word, are adressed to one or more gods, divine or sacred persons in anticipation of help, blessings or a good relationship.
There are prescribed prayers, e.g. the Lord's Prayer and Ave Maria, and there are prayers, which are spontaneous and individual. Both kinds are present in Andersen's tales.
Example 1:
The poor cretin crept into his bed, and was not seen throughout the whole next day. But the following evening he came to Rudy.
"Write a letter for me please!" he said. "Saperli can't write. Saperli can only take letter to post office."
"A letter for you?" Rudy asked. "To whom?"
"To our Lord Christ!"
"What do you mean?"
And the half-wit, as he was called, looked at Rudy with a touching expression, clasped his hands, and said solemnly and reverently, "Jesus Christ! Saperli would send Him a letter to pray Him that Saperli lie dead, and not the master of the house here."
And Rudy pressed his hand. "That letter wouldn't reach up there. That letter wouldn't restore him to us."
He found it very difficult to convince Saperli how impossible his request was.
"Now you must be the support of the house," said his aunt. And Rudy became just that.
Example 2:
"Oh, what beauty! What happiness!" both of them said.
"Earth can give me no more," said Rudy. "An evening like this is like a whole life. How often have I realized my good fortune, as I realize it now, and thought that if everything ended for me at once now I have still had a happy life! What a blessed world this is! One day passes, and a new one, even more beautiful than the other, begins. Our Lord is infinitely good, Babette!"
"I'm so happy!" she said.
"Earth can give me no more," exclaimed Rudy. Then the vesper bells sounded from the Savoy mountains and the mountains of Switzerland. The dark-blue Jura stood up in golden splendor in the west.
"God give you all that is brightest and best!" exclaimed Babette.
"He will," said Rudy. "Tomorrow I shall have that wish. Tomorrow you'll be wholly mine – my own lovely, little wife!"
"The boat!" Babette suddenly cried.
For the boat that was to take them back had broken loose and was drifting away from the island.
"I'll get it!" said Rudy, and he stripped off his coat and boots, plunged into the lake, and swam with vigorous strokes after the boat.
The clear blue-green water from the mountain glacier was icy and deep. Rudy looked down into the depths; he took only a single glance, and yet, he thought he saw a gold ring trembling, glittering, wavering there! He thought of his lost engagement ring, and the ring became larger and spread out into a glittering circle, within which appeared the clear glacier. Endless deep chasms yawned about it, and the dropping water tinkled like the sound of bells and glowed with pale blue flames. In a second he beheld what will take us many long words to describe!
Young hunters and young girls, men and women who had once fallen into the glacier's crevasses, stood there as in life, with open eyes and smiling lips, while far below them arose from buried villages the chimes of church bells. The congregation knelt beneath the church roofs; icicles made the organ pipes, and the mountain torrents furnished the music. And the Ice Maiden sat on the clear, transparent ground. She stretched herself up toward Rudy and kissed his feet, and there shot through his limbs a deadly chill like an electric shock – ice and fire, one could not be distinguished from the other in that brief touch.
"Mine! Mine!" sounded around him and within him. "I kissed you when you were little – kissed you on the mouth! Now I kiss you on your toes and your heels – now you belong to me!"
And he disappeared in the clear blue water.
All was still. The church bells had ceased their ringing; their last tones had died away with the glow on the red clouds above.
"You are mine!" sounded from the depths below. "You are mine!" resounded from beyond the heights – from infinity itself!
How wonderful to pass from love to love, from earth to heaven!
A thread seemed to break, and sorrowful tones echoed around. The icy kiss of death had conquered what was mortal; the prelude to the drama of life had ended before the play itself had begun. And discord had resolved itself into harmony.
Do you call this a sad story?
Example 3:
Babette sat with folded hands, her head in her lap, utterly worn out by grief, tears, and screams for help.
"In the deep water," she said to herself, "far down there as if under a glacier, he lies!"
Then she thought of what Rudy had told her about his mother's death, and of his escape, how he was lifted up out of the cleft of the glacier almost dead. "The Ice Maiden has him again!"
Then there came a flash of lightning as dazzling as the rays of the sun on white snow. Babette jumped up; at that moment the lake rose like a shining glacier; there stood the Ice Maiden, majestic, bluish, pale, glittering, with Rudy's corpse at her feet.
"Mine!" she said, and again everything was darkness and torrential rain.
"Horrible!" groaned Babette. "Ah, why should he die when our day of happiness was so near? Dear God, make me understand; shed light into my heart! I cannot understand the ways of your almighty power and wisdom!"
And God enlightened her heart. A memory – a ray of mercy – her dream of the night before – all rushed vividly through her mind. She remembered the words she had spoken, the wish for the best for herself and Rudy.
"Pity me! Was it the seed of sin in my heart? Was my dream, a glimpse into the future, whose course had to be violently changed to save me from guilt? How miserable I am!"
In the pitch-black night she sat weeping. And now in the deep stillness around her she seemed to hear the last words he had spoken here, "Earth can give me no more." They had been spoken in the fullest of joy; they echoed in the depths of great sorrow.
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