Sarah Perry: ‘For much of my life, I loved God. The echo of that never fades’ | Sarah Perry | The Guardian

It suited her few friends to imagine she’d been subject to a thousand physical and spiritual abuses, and been thrown out of chapel doors that then were bolted against her. It was difficult to explain that her father and her aunt received her absence with sorrow tempered by their trust in the will of God. She would return to Bethesda, or she wouldn’

And these days I seek out my faith in other doctrines’ – he gestured at a spectrograph nearby, and a four-inch reflecting telescope fitted with filters to aid in observations of the sun. ‘I supplement God with physics, and understand each as well as the other. Which is to say: not in the least! But I find it magnificent, knowledge piled on knowledg

Occasionally it struck him that his love for the stars was no less a matter of faith than his remaining love for God; so his two faiths weren’t opposed, but took up equal residence.

‘Thomas, I try and try to be good but I don’t know how. I want to be free to think my own thoughts about what is good, and what is bad – sometimes I wonder what it would be like to wake up on a Sunday morning and have it be just another day – to wear make-up, and jeans, and go to parties, and not think every minute that I’ve made God angry, or been

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d

Occasionally she would seem to become the sole focus of his interest, and he’d interrogate her with the attention of a student making notes: why did she have to wear a hat on Sundays? Why did she never wear jeans? Why didn’t she have a television? Was it true she’d never been to the cinema? When she answered, she said either it was because her fath

‘And besides,’ she said, evidently unable to speak frankly, ‘how will I know how to be good, if there is nobody to tell me?’ ‘Oh, goodness, what is it? Nobody can agree,’ said Thomas, in whom pain relief had raised a nauseated giddy sensation. ‘I scarcely agree with myself from one day to the next – sometimes I think goodness is something fixed and

Suddenly the faith of her childhood struck her as comical: the idea that hell boiled away under the tarmac and pavements of Beechwood Avenue, that if she put her ear to the carpet she’d hear the ringing of pitchforks forged on devils’ anvils, the hissing of embers on penitent flesh – how ridiculous it was, how evidently only nightmares to frighten