‘Not real. I see.’ The long fingers began squeezing one another. ‘Not real. Hmm, not, not
‘Not real parents I mean.’
‘I understand you don’t think God is “real” either?’
When Roderick slipped off his shoe, his foot just reached the top of the deep carpet pile. He started running it back and forth to feel the slight pain that wasn’t really painful. ‘I don’t know. All I said was, if Dan made me and God made Dan, who made God? Father O’Bride got awful mad then.’
‘Yes well… Tell me, Roderick, have you ever looked up at the stars, and wondered?’
‘Wondered?’
‘How it all got there: millions on millions of little points of light, each one a great big sun, perhaps a sun with planets like our own Terra, perhaps with intelligent beings like us — but millions on millions of these suns, so far apart that the light from them takes centuries to reach us — haven’t you ever wondered how that all came about? Who made it?’
‘Sure, Father. I figure maybe it was just always there. Or else maybe it just popped up one day and there it was. Or maybe it—’
‘Yes yess, I can see you’ve thought about it. Now—’
‘—makes itself. Or heck, does it need to be made anyhow? Couldn’t it just—’
‘Fine, yes, that’s enough. But tell me, don’t you ever wonder if there isn’t something — or Someone — behind it all? Even if the universe “makes itself”, who arranged it that way? Eh? Eh?’
‘I don’t know, Father. What’s the point of wondering if you can’t find out the answer?’
‘Ah!’ The fingers came together, forming a little cage. ‘Just that!’
‘Huh?’
‘What’s the point of wondering? The “point” is, here you are, wondering what the point is.’
‘…?’
‘That is to say, God is the Ultimate Mystery, the Paradox of Paradoxes — by the way, do you know what a paradox is?’
‘Sure Father, don’t you?’ Roderick sat up. ‘It’s like a sign that says “Don’t Read Signs”. Or like, like priests, if they want to have kids they have to stop being Fathers.’
‘Yes fine, but what I meant was, God is — is unknowable. Great minds have been racking their brains for centuries trying to answer questions about Him, and — and getting nowhere fast, you might say. He is All Good, yet allows evil to exist in His world, the world He made. He is All Powerful, yet He allows people to disobey Him. He knows the future, yet we are still free to choose how we will live our lives. He is All Loving, yet allows His beloved Son to die on the Cross. He—’
‘Father I don’t get any of this. Especially the stuff about the Cross, the sacrafice Sister Olaf called it. But I mean in chess a sacrafice is just a sucker play — Father O’Bride says it’s the same in baseball — so how come this All Smart God fell for it?’
‘Fell for…?’
‘I mean here he had everybody just where he wanted them, he was going to send everybody to Hell, right? So I mean if he takes the Son instead his game position has gotta be worse after, right? I mean the only reason you make a sacrafice is to force the other guy to give you a better deal, sucker him into it, yeah? Like Father O’Bride does all the time with his t-shirt deals—’
‘Stop, stop, stop! Wait, wait a minute, wait…’ Father Warren seemed to be having trouble with his hands, the fingers knotting and tangling almost as though the hemispheres of his brain were at war. ‘I can see we’ll need a lot more work. A
‘Yeah but Father is that what you meant by God being a paradox? How he was so pleased to get a chance to nail his Son there that he even gave up his plan to fry the whole world in Hell?’
When the hands were finally under control, the priest said, ‘Let’s, let’s leave it at that for today, okay?’
When the little robot had slid from its chair and waddled out of the room, Father Warren shuddered. ‘Game position!’ What kind of world was it to make a child think like that? It was a cry for help from a fettered soul, for sure. Fettered in a broken body too the pathos of it reminded him of a passage in
Not because its hands were nailed and helpless, but because they were only made of wood and therefore even more helpless, because the thing, for all its realism, was inanimate and could not in any way hit back…
XVI
The Devil tricks us with puppets, to which he has glued angels’ wings.
The blizzard outside kept repeating all the long vowels to itself. Roderick was in his room reading
The garage door creaked in a way that could not be the wind. Roderick crept downstairs and found Pa shivering and coughing in his workroom.
‘Pa, what are you—?’
‘Shh, don’t wake Ma. Do me a favour, son. Put my coat by the kitchen stove and dry it off, will you? If Ma finds it wet in the morning she’ll throw a tizzy.’
‘Well sure but — hey Pa how come you’re all dripping wet and your coat is still dry inside?’
‘Took it off. To uh, wrap some stuff I was carrying.’
‘What stuff, hey?’
‘Just stuff, spare parts.’ Pa suppressed a heaving cough. ‘Don’t say anything to Ma, okay? Our little secret.’
Roderick carried the wet mackinaw out of the room, but did not close the door quite shut. He put his eye to the crack and looked in.
But all he could see was Pa’s hand, hanging up a key under the picture of Rex Reason. He went back upstairs to say his prayers:
‘Our Father, if we have one, Who might be in Heaven, if there is one…’
There was an awful lot of God at school, but whenever Roderick tried to ask a question, Sister Olaf just looked cross and told him to take it up with Father Warren. So he tried working it out for himself.
The Holy Trinity must be a lot like in the Oz stories. After all, God was God the Father, but God was also the Holy Trinity, the place where He or She lived with two friends. Oz was just like that: it was this terrific wizard who could do anything, and it was also the place where he lived. Anyway, OZ = PA, that was plain, and nobody knew what Oz (or God) looked like.
God the Father was so wise that his wisdom turned into this pigeon called the Holy Ghost. Couldn’t that be the Scarecrow? Crows and pigeons being birds, and ghosts being scarey. The Scarecrow was always worried about fire, too, and didn’t Sister Olaf say something about the H.G. turning into tongues of flame? Well then.
The Father and H.G. loved each other a lot and had this Son, the one you always saw pointing to his shiny heart and smiling. That just about had to be the Tin Woodman. He too was a carpenter, and Oz gave him a heart made out of shiny silk. ,
Dorothy was kind of a problem until he read through his book of Bible stories. Because in this house at Bethany, God the Son was just sitting there when this woman came up and poured oil all over him — just the way
