January 24, 2006

Quirk

I recently called up my old friend and mentor, the Revd Canon Father P D Quirk, D D, whose predicates are longer than his name, for his opinion about prayer and whether our kind of country really needs a law so people can talk to God.

He said why ask him, that he was retired and didn’t pray as much as he used to, but that it was not because he no longer gets paid for it, even though the money was never all that great, and even though prayer had been more or less his major line of work.

I said that’s why I called him, having been in the same pursuit, myself. Actually, I was feeling ambivalent about hoping people might pray more than they seem to and was also wondering whether making them do it might not be somewhat counterproductive, so I wanted to know what did he think.

He chortled some and asked whether I’d heard that the Primates now making a case about whether we might be heathens or not have almost 95% of the same DNA as the rest of us. For him, a primate is a primate is a primate. He makes no distinction.

And come to think of it, I guess he’ll do almost anything to avoid talking about prayer for fear the conversation will get around to the subject of centering prayer. I’m not sure why, its being so in vogue and all, but I suspect it may be, as we’ve wondered here before, just that he’s altogether too eccentric.

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