Sublime

The gods of our ancestors were, on the whole, gods of the wild places;

A woman was leaving the asylum on midsummer morning. She went warily down steps leading to a gravel drive, observing her own feet with interest and care, as she might have watched children inclined to run into the road.

And so there are many wells which, like Madron, are named now for the saints – but under their shallow surface ripples lie the deep, clear traces of far older stories.

Solitude can happen to anyone: we are all at risk.

You have an inchoate, inarticulate, groping feeling that there is something else, something more, something that may be scary but may also be beautiful.

Her few clothes hung austerely on a rail, and a television overlooked the foot of the bed; she watched it indiscriminately and with confusion, trying to make Bethesda’s child into an ordinary woman. And indeed she was ordinary, where certain essential matters were concerned – had not believed in hell since the day she’d laughed at the belt in her f

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’

Sorrow must be allowed to blossom into self-forgetful love of God.