In Praise of Praising...

This piece was interesting but repetitive at best. The author quite obviously felt that handwriting was a form of prayer, and I can be inclined to agree with him to a point. Handwriting was and is an activity that requires a vast amount of concentration and focus to make it neat, even and accurate. When monks sat down to copy a text, they were forced to think about nothing else other than that which they were copying, to think of anything else was a potential distraction and could cause them to make a mistake on the page. For this reason, it is easy to see why it could be considered another form of prayer: the scribe’s sole focus is the “word of god”. In addition to this reason, the fact that it is a handmade piece of literature adds to its praise worthiness. In my personal understanding and explanation, god created man and in his divine love, he gave us free will. Now, if we, as his creations, use said free will to perform a task considered solely of god, for god and by god, we are doing his will; utilizing our right to choose to better love and praise a higher being. Scribes did just that. In their beliefs, copying the word of god in an elegant and beautiful way, dedicating hours upon hours of focus to this singular task, and, thereby spreading the word of god further than before was precisely what god wanted. Now, as I said before, I do agree that handwriting can be a form of prayer, to a point and purely logistically. But if the criteria afore mentioned are the requirements for an action to be considered a prayer, I put forth this question: Why can’t type print be a form of prayer as well? First, the person creating the typewritten page must also focus on the words they are creating. If the craftsman in charge of creating the typewritten page looses focus, not only will the one copy he is making be incorrect, but the numerous copies after it will be flawed in the exact same way. Furthermore, he is also using his body and free will to create a piece of work solely based on the word of god, and he can create more copies, quicker to spread the word much further. In my opinion, this person was obviously speaking about his own feelings toward writing. Perhaps he felt threatened by the idea that something that takes so much time, study and dedication was to be quickly replaced by a machine, which seems to be a running theme throughout history; fear of heartless, emotionless objects replacing thinking, feeling, loving human beings, and rightly so. Even now, there are a number of robots completing tasks that once a human had to be trained and trusted to do. It just goes to show, industrialization effects more than product distribution and profit margins, it effects the human heart.