May the Lord guard us from Daleks
“Daddy,” says four-year-old Eli one evening.
“Yes son?”
“If we don’t say our prayers the baddy aliens will get us.”
“Excuse me?” I said, somewhat surprised. I wasn’t expecting that to be honest.
What followed was quite a rambling conversation so I’ll boil it down for you.
Eli has a learnt a prayer at school, to say at bedtime. It goes like this: “Lord keep us safe this night/ Secure from all our fears/May angels guard us while we sleep/ Till morning light appears.”
His understanding of what this prayer means is a bit, well, off the wall.
As he sees it, it’s essentially about asking the Lord to protect us. And what do we need protecting from? Overnight alien invasion of course!
This, in Eli’s mind, is the only thing it could possibly mean. The angels hang around, waiting to kick some alien butt. “If it’s not that,” he reasoned, “why does it say ‘angels guard us’?” Good point, small child.
“Children can need protecting from other things, ” I said. He shot me a look that said: “I absolutely refuse to believe anything you say.”
At this point my wife managed to supress her giggles long enough to join in too. “It’s a very old prayer Eli,” she explained. “And in the olden days there were lots of diseases and some people were very poor so they needed protecting from bad bugs. I think that’s what they meant.”
He didn’t believe her either.
When they first start learning about it, religion can be a funny thing for kids. Ahead of my First Holy Communion as a six-year-old, legend has it I spent weeks blessing anything that moved and anything that didn’t – the dog, my Mum, cups of tea etc all got a holy and serene wave of the hand over them from time to time while I whispered a few incantations.
Catholics, eh!
Eli has his firm belief in a Higher Power, a force for good there to protect us. He is as readily accepting of this as he is, say, of his firm belief that animals can secretly talk.
Yet he refuses to believe our simple everyday explanations for all manner of things – we had to take him to a farm before he finally, reluctantly accepted milk came from cows.
On the one hand it’s this sort of thing that makes being a parent so rewarding. Seeing him grow up and learn new things each day and getting an insight into how the world works from the perspective of fresh young eyes has provided the Short family with some of our biggest laughs of recent years. Then there’s the warm, fuzzy feeling of satisfaction as he grasps new concepts and ideas, as he grows and develops. Although it must be said this can backfire from time to time and destroy and semblance of childlike wonder. Example: when Mrs Short recently pointed to a particularly bright moon and asked him: “Can you see the man in the moon? Can you see his face?”
“Mummy,” he replied with disdain at her stupidity. “The grey bits are where meteorites have hit. It’s not a real face.”
Related articles
- Angel of Fatima’s Prayer (catholicglasses.com)
- A Prayer Before Going To Bed (mimentovivere.wordpress.com)
- How to Survive an Alien Invasion (escapistmagazine.com)
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