THE Collect being the one which asks the Lord to keep us under
the protection of his good providence, and the second lesson being
the one about St Paul and his nephew, I remember Robert Louis
Stevenson and his mother on Samoa, ruling the natives with a
Scottish rod of iron. The wonderful writer had gone there to seek a
climate which might add a few more months to his life. He was 44,
and had written some 40 books. What they had not expected was to
have to rule the roost.
But these were the days when the British Empire unblushingly saw
"lesser breeds as children", thus in this instance summoning the
Samoans to family prayers. Young and old, men and women, boys and
girls, bathed, put flowers in their hair, sang Scottish hymns, and
worshipped God the Edinburgh way.
Many years after her husband's death, Mrs Stevenson published
the prayers which Stevenson wrote for this Edinburgh worship on a
South Sea island. In it, she likens it to the prayers which a child
says at his mother's knee.
"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. . . After all work and
meals were finished, the 'pu', or war conch, was sounded from the
back veranda and the front.
"I don't think it ever occurred to us that there was any
incongruity in the use of the war conch for the peaceful invitation
to prayer. . . The Samoans, men, women and children, trooped in
through all the open doors. Once, the Chief left the room suddenly
- "I am not yet fit to say 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us.'" Stevenson's last prayer was for
the renewal of joy. "Look down upon the dry bones, quicken,
enliven; create in us the soul of service, the spirit of peace;
renew in us the sense of joy." He calls God "our guide and our
angel." They called him Tusitala - storyteller - and
buried him on a hill where he had walked to see the setting
sun.
In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson
novelises the dual nature of man: its goodness and its evil,
although there was nothing in his own existence that justifies the
latter. His brilliant output made him too busy to be bad. Forty on
the whole wonderful stories, an American wife and her son by an
earlier marriage, an Edinburgh mother, and some of the best letters
in the English language, a physical restlessness which kept him
walking, sailing, and those collapsing lungs which cried for more
and more air, kept him amazingly on the go every minute of the day.
Thus his evening prayer.
"Prolong our days in peace and honour. Give us health, food,
bright weather, and light hearts. . . Let us lie down without fear
and awake and arise with exultation. . . Let us not lose the savour
of past mercies and past pleasures; but, like the voice of a bird
singing in the rain, let grateful memory survive in the hour of
darkness."
Later on, he asks God to "teach us the lesson of trees and the
meaning of fish". When I was a child, I was given his Child's
Garden of Verses, with its poem "The Lamplighter", and I can
just remember such a person cycling round our small Suffolk town,
touching a gas-jet here and there, but leaving a mile of darkness
to our house. Stevenson's father built lighthouses - including the
Eddystone lighthouse.