Sublime

They were kept as fallow gardens ... but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind.

She could crouch on the wind-whipped grass and dig the stones from the ground and fling them down at the suspicious cottiers and their fear of any woman who was not tethered to man or hearth. There, upon the mountain, her difference – no matter its great weight, its sharp and restless ache upon her heart – was, in the face of such unyielding beauty

numinous and sacred, is waiting to receive each one of us if we choose to become familiar with it.

paths should cross at certain times on certain days. That they’d become friends seemed to her both natural and miraculous. From the minute she’d seen him blinking behind the hard dark ranks of Bethesda’s pews, she’d felt he belonged to her: evidently God had ordained the whole business.

In times of deep darkness, the cairns that have kept me in the way of Jesus were the prayers and practices of the church. In times of deep darkness, the

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

ecclesiastical

She pulled the blanket to her breast. She was tired. Darkness came in from the periphery until the blanket was the whole of her view – and how marvellous it is, she thought, how remarkable, and it has simply been there on my lap all this time! Look how deep the blue is in the folds, look how the sun strikes it and makes the fibres burn – she lifted

a holy thing, To love what death can touch.