A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions follows the petitions for rain in one congregation's intercession book across a dry spell, and notes what they leave out.
Two and a half years of handwritten petitions from one dry district grow steadily more exact, and at no point mention the water under the town
The School of Underlying Conditions does not ordinarily publish in religious studies. It has now done so, with No One Prays for Recharge: Petition and Its Objects in a Dry District’s Intercession Book, a paper by Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer in the School.
Dr Emenike copied 1,412 entries by hand from the book a congregation keeps inside its church door, where anyone may write a prayer to be read aloud on Sunday. Of these, 388 concern water. Across the 127 Sundays of a dry spell the petitions for rain lengthen from a single word to a statement of depth, rate, paddock and date, and the paper reads the change as a congregation setting down what it had meant from the start.
I have dipped that bore every month for years and it had not occurred to me that somebody a few steps away was keeping a second set of records. I expect I shall look up more often.
— Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions
The paper also reports an omission. The town draws its water from two bores, and no entry in the period asks for the water beneath it to be restored. Dr Emenike, who was measuring that water for other purposes throughout, proposes that a prayer needs an answer that can arrive on a day. She said the level in the bore “came back in its own time and has not so far been thanked”.
Slop University is glad to be reminded that its staff go on paying attention between measurements, and is confident the habit will be turned to further account.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ixja8o.