Reverend Lovegood’s Automated Prayer Machine

If only the late Reverend Thomas Lovegood had had more faith he might be with us today but then we would never have had his marvellous invention.

He’d got the idea one afternoon whilst soaking in his bathtub they say, up to his neck in warm bubbles, thinking about an upcoming sermon on the power of belief.

“What if there was a machine”, he’d thought, “A prayer machine that people would put their money into just like a slot machine? Pay and pray. What a money spinner that would be”.

He could even build it himself, he decided. He had always been good with mechanical things and would have been a mechanic if his parents had not insisted upon him becoming a priest like his Uncle Mortimer.

And once he’d set his mind to building it, it hadn’t taken him more than a fortnight to make the prototype, using the remains of an old one-armed bandit as his starting point and just adding religious features like the crucifix shaped antenna ‘for transmitting prayers to Heaven’ and an old telephone receiver spray-painted gold for speaking the prayers into as well as an illuminated sign that would flash up the word Hallelujah each time a coin was fed into the slot.

“Who knows”, he thought, his eyes lighting up as he dreamed of a global business empire based on the mass manufacturing of his prayer machines, “There could be one on every street corner, they could be as ubiquitous as telephone boxes”.

And his first prayer machine demonstration was a great success. Once word had spread about the ‘Reverend’s new Spiritual innovation’, parishioners were queuing up all around his church to try it out.

Unfortunately for the poor Reverend, however, his ex-wife Sandra Kirksby also turned up at the church that Sunday.

The Reverends alimony check was late and she had come with it in her mind to cause a scene in front of his congregation.

But then, when she heard all about her ex-husbands miraculous new machine she was dying to see it for herself.

And God must have been listening when the ex- Mrs Lovegood put her money into the slot of the Prayer machine that Sunday afternoon or at least that’s how most people explain the Reverends sudden heart attack not long afterwards.

Still, the Reverend Lovegood would have been happy to know that his prayers were also answered
that day for, thanks to his wife’s insistence that her prayers for his death had been answered, ‘Reverend Lovegood’s Automated Prayer Machines’ soon began to sell like hotcakes.