Time of the Child

you can correct me if I am wrong, is that for the accomplishment of what was intended, God is required to have a patience not otherwise imaginable by human beings, except vaguely by the word unearthly. My understanding is He sees and knows, and foresaw and foreknew, all our errors, all our wrong turns and catastrophes, and still loved us. And still loved us. Not because but despite. He has already seen that child and seen to it that she was brought to this house, and seen to it that my daughter would love her. He has already read this story, and knows how it goes, because he knows there are humans in it. And that’s where His patience has to come in. Because. Because in some part of Him, in some part of Him He remembers that He made us with the intention of love. And that no matter how many times, no matter how many ways we find to defeat that intention, it is still there. Still there. And beats any regulation, ruling, decree or code, is beyond all jurisdiction or legislation made by man, because it pre-dates all, didn’t even need to be commanded. Love. That’s my understanding. And that’s what’s in that kitchen. That’s what came to this house the day of the fair. And that’s what I am going to try and keep alive. You can go ahead now and tell me where I’ve gone wrong. Father.

Because one day you or I may be in the same place that Tom is now, and at that time what we will be hoping, what we will be praying for is that there is still enough decency in the world to allow us every last chance to sleep in our own bed, until that is impossible and we need professional care. But until then, we will be hoping, we will be praying, there will be someone who still sees us as people not patients. That’s why.

There might have been an invisible force pressing down on each day, but rain and religion had left the people a twinned philosophy of offering it up and getting on with it.

He did not know if he believed in the Holy Spirit, but if asked he would have said that night was the closest he came, that there was an otherness, a largeness apparent and invisible there at the same time, something that did not exist in the textbooks but was the same thing that had been since the beginning, which was that there was something more than the perimeter of flesh, something else and beyond explanation, and which was felt in that part of us that, for lack of any better, was given the word soul. In the growing warmth of the congregation at Communion, the

in his last year, claimed that the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along.

How was she still awake, still standing, he wondered, and not for the first time considered that God's first mistake was starting with a man.

But storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life.

You could learn more from women than just putting down the toilet seat.

he succumbed to the seasonal sentiment that was chronic but harmless: it was possible to believe in human goodness.

But at early breakfasts and late teas, that were the only time the three of them were together, and the only time nobody else saw him, the doctor found himself succumbing to the gaiety of grandfathers who know they did so much wrong as a father the first time, and who, from an appreciation not too late of the shortness of life, let the rules fall away, coming instead under the governance of the tiny hand clutching their forefinger.

I’ll see you in the morning,’ her father said, and raised a palm a few inches in a compendium gesture of Goodnight farewell thank you I’m sorry and I love you.

queueing at the counter was only for Protestants.

He drove on, travelling in that inner country where the body is stationary, but the mind moves faster than the wheels.

Like all household arrangements, it was made up as they went along, and like all such escaped the judgement of right and wrong by the oldest alibi, family.

The thing she put you in mind of was a paper kite, with thin light struts and a flutter ribbon of nerves that spun wild in the smallest breeze. She was not built for big wind, and soon enough the buffeting of life on the western edge of a wet nowhere loosened the struts and undid the glue that kept all in place.

history long since eaten by rain and dressed by a verdant moss so vigorous as to seem a cemetery vegetable.

God wants us to love, was a saying of his father’s, despite the way he made us.

we all had to carry the cross for the birthday of baby Jesus.

Medicine was not nothing, from the anguish of spiritual meaninglessness there was reprieve in aiding another, though there remained the mystery why caring for the sick was easier than for the well, and for the stranger than your own blood.

the small and ordinary which

She looked at life with such a direct gaze that God Himself would be shy,

Only through the birth of a child

How was she still awake, still standing he wondered, and not for the first time considered that God's first mistake was starting with a man.

challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, And yet live. Yet live, Jack.

He had been there long enough to have treated most of their fathers and mothers, many grandfathers and grandmothers too, and recognise ailments that were like artefacts passed down the family, inarguable proofs of the theory that since human beings first stood upright, nothing was ever really cured.

the sky all the time evidencing the existence of time and the mercy of creation by a thin but constant lightening,

in a boy’s way burnishing the chore to adventure.