himself, and he doesn't, so he doesn't want to.” Hildy thought it was silly to imagine God as a sort of busybody continually interfering in the quotidian: the natural order of rules and their consequences had been set up at the beginning, and they functioned now by themselves, accessible to any thinking person of good will. Mary might appear to children here and there with messages, for reasons of her own, but God didn't bother with those sorts of miracles. What Hildy most appreciated about God the Father was his clear if impersonal realism. It's what she most appreciated in her own father too.
Living far from institutional checks, Sam Oliphant had grown heterodox, Pelagian; unwittingly he fell into the heretical doctrine of two churches, one for children and the ignorant, in which all the stories were true as given, unquestionable; and another for the smart, who knew better. Like an eighteenth-century deist, Sam took it that his ground of faith was simply the conclusions of reason, and every layer of liturgy or dogma or ritual compliance laid over that ground was made acceptable, if not actually justifiable, by the initial irreducible sensibleness. You met all your varied obligations in the big church to the letter, but you believed only what reason agreed to; in fact if reason demanded it, then it was dogma. The world itself was the product of reason, of evolution progressing, making sense, of people getting smarter and seeing the sense the world made. The sense the world made was truth; God had made it, and His Church wasn't going to contradict it. Like fraternity secrets or team mascots, the absurdities of faith didn't bother Sam, because this was his side, they were his absurdities.
"Daddy, did you ever baptize anybody?"
"Not that I remember."
"Well because Sister said that everybody and especially doctors should know how to baptize somebody, in case you find somebody dying who wants to be baptized. Especially doctors."
"In case I'm about to lose one, huh? I should get them to heaven if I can't keep ‘em on earth."
"You don't need a priest or holy water. You just do it."
"What if you don't have any water?"
"It has to be mostly water. You could use muddy water."
" Mostly water! You know your own body is mostly water? Sixty-five percent. A woodchuck is mostly water! Am I allowed to baptize people by hitting them with a woodchuck?"
"Daddy!"
In the fights he liked to pick with his children or with Winnie over religious punctilio (to which he brought a gleeful sophistry), Sam seemed often to be actually addressing someone else, or intending someone else to overhear and be amused, some other version of himself; he said things the child couldn't be expected to get or even to notice were supposed to be funny. Pierce could sometimes tell when he did it to Warren, so he could assume Sam was doing it to him as well, when he couldn't tell.
Irony doesn't come naturally to children; brutal sarcasm (" Now are you satisfied?") they can recognize and deplore, but—especially in religion—they are dogmatists, not ironists; Sam's teasing left them in difficulties he seemed not to feel, and mortified. They all caught on to the trick eventually, and made it their own, as they did Sam's heresy of Two Churches, which came to seem only common sense to them; but it generated within them a kind of double life, lived differently by each of them. It was a harsh training, and Hildy only survived it in the end by reversing the terms, Sam's terms, which were outward observance ironized by inward demur: Hildy's outward jokey familiarity would approach contempt, and get her in some hot water with her Order and its superiors, but it expressed an inward allegiance deeper than any words.
* * * *
Sister Mary Philomel's was a different deity from Sam's, more manifold and perplexing, more nearby too.
"Children,” she said to them. “In the little garden in the middle of the hospital, right in the middle of the garden where the pathways
Living far from institutional checks, Sam Oliphant had grown heterodox, Pelagian; unwittingly he fell into the heretical doctrine of two churches, one for children and the ignorant, in which all the stories were true as given, unquestionable; and another for the smart, who knew better. Like an eighteenth-century deist, Sam took it that his ground of faith was simply the conclusions of reason, and every layer of liturgy or dogma or ritual compliance laid over that ground was made acceptable, if not actually justifiable, by the initial irreducible sensibleness. You met all your varied obligations in the big church to the letter, but you believed only what reason agreed to; in fact if reason demanded it, then it was dogma. The world itself was the product of reason, of evolution progressing, making sense, of people getting smarter and seeing the sense the world made. The sense the world made was truth; God had made it, and His Church wasn't going to contradict it. Like fraternity secrets or team mascots, the absurdities of faith didn't bother Sam, because this was his side, they were his absurdities.
"Daddy, did you ever baptize anybody?"
"Not that I remember."
"Well because Sister said that everybody and especially doctors should know how to baptize somebody, in case you find somebody dying who wants to be baptized. Especially doctors."
"In case I'm about to lose one, huh? I should get them to heaven if I can't keep ‘em on earth."
"You don't need a priest or holy water. You just do it."
"What if you don't have any water?"
"It has to be mostly water. You could use muddy water."
" Mostly water! You know your own body is mostly water? Sixty-five percent. A woodchuck is mostly water! Am I allowed to baptize people by hitting them with a woodchuck?"
"Daddy!"
In the fights he liked to pick with his children or with Winnie over religious punctilio (to which he brought a gleeful sophistry), Sam seemed often to be actually addressing someone else, or intending someone else to overhear and be amused, some other version of himself; he said things the child couldn't be expected to get or even to notice were supposed to be funny. Pierce could sometimes tell when he did it to Warren, so he could assume Sam was doing it to him as well, when he couldn't tell.
Irony doesn't come naturally to children; brutal sarcasm (" Now are you satisfied?") they can recognize and deplore, but—especially in religion—they are dogmatists, not ironists; Sam's teasing left them in difficulties he seemed not to feel, and mortified. They all caught on to the trick eventually, and made it their own, as they did Sam's heresy of Two Churches, which came to seem only common sense to them; but it generated within them a kind of double life, lived differently by each of them. It was a harsh training, and Hildy only survived it in the end by reversing the terms, Sam's terms, which were outward observance ironized by inward demur: Hildy's outward jokey familiarity would approach contempt, and get her in some hot water with her Order and its superiors, but it expressed an inward allegiance deeper than any words.
* * * *
Sister Mary Philomel's was a different deity from Sam's, more manifold and perplexing, more nearby too.
"Children,” she said to them. “In the little garden in the middle of the hospital, right in the middle of the garden where the pathways
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