Home > Work > Faith
1 " I open my heart to her and lay it on the table. "
― Jennifer Haigh , Faith
2 " The story of my family. . .changes with the teller. "
3 " I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . . "
4 " The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer. "
5 " But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head. "
6 " ...sooner or later you have to decide what you believe." It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice. "
7 " It wasn’t her problem to solve; it was Kevin’s. Let God fix him. After repeating the words for months, she finally understood what they meant. Let go and let God. "
8 " ...that renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left? "
9 " What can a photograph mean? It seems to me, now, that it’s not so much the image itself as the fact that it was kept. In my own bedroom closet are three large boxes I labeled—late one night, in a dark mood—PLUTONIUM. They are filled with my own keepsakes and very heavy, decades of living distilled down to a few potent sentiments: tenderness, longing, regret. "
10 " Often enough, one of us will make the other laugh so hard and long that asphyxiation seems a real danger. It’s a heady pleasure rare in adulthood, not unlike—I will say it—the shared breathlessness of rousingly successful coitus. "
11 " You knew about that?” Nearly thirty years later, the memory was still embarrassing. I worried what it said about me. At best it seemed to point to some intrinsic foolishness, a deep-seated eccentricity that lurked within me still. "
12 " My heart aches for her. I am, myself, no stranger to this waiting, the charged and terrible uncertainty that follows the surrender to passion—this dangling in limbo, waiting, waiting for a man to call. "
13 " And yet there’s no denying that these events generated a tidal wave of confusion and shame, and neither party was much of a swimmer. "
14 " That night he’d glimpsed, however briefly, a sweetly exalted human happiness he’d only read about, Art who’d spent his whole life reading about apparitions. In those few moments he knew genuine tenderness, given and received. He experienced grace. If it sounds like heresy, I am far past caring: for my brother, making love to Kath was a reflection of divine love, a brief flash of God alive in the world. "
15 " It’s true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art’s eyes, she resembled our mother. I can’t look at Mike’s face without seeing Dad’s. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind. "
16 " To Mike—to most people who have ever known her—Kath Conlon has disappeared completely. It is an addict’s trick, this vanishing act, this dizzying plunge through a dim portal into a dark and beguiling parallel world. "
17 " Driving east into the bright sun, he’d been dogged by a creeping sense of déjà vu, but it wasn’t until Kath called to Aidan—Help Father with the cooler!—that he recognized the scene from his own childhood. How strange, how disorienting, to find himself in the man’s seat, driving, when in his mind he was still the little boy. "
18 " He spent two weeks in South Shore Hospital in a state of near oblivion; and when he woke, it was as though he’d taken a trip around the world and lost most of his luggage along the way. Heavy bags they were, packed with thirty years of indignities, rages, brawls and indiscretions. "
19 " All these explanations, and more, had been offered to Arthur. He could choose from among them whichever he liked, like drawing a card from a deck. "
20 " Kath woke the next morning in a state of dazed wonder. It is a sensation I have experienced myself, a frank amazement when my cynicism is confounded. When, defying all precedent, the thing I most desire actually appears. "
