Читать книгу The Blessing - Gregory Orr - Страница 15

5

Child Mind

I don’t know how adult minds arrive at meanings. I don’t know what they need, or how they figure things out. But here are two stories about children and how they think. When my wife, as a child, first heard the opening phrase of the prayer “Our Father who art in Heaven,” she imagined a bearded man wearing a smock and a beret, holding a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and standing before an easel. And why not? Here was a Creator God. Here is the figure who might well have painted the bright primary arc of the rainbow as a symbol of his good intentions toward his people. I’m not surprised my wife became a painter.

The other story about how children think isn’t so charming and benign. I heard it from my younger brother, Jonathan, only recently, when he learned I was writing this book. It was a story he had never told anyone except his wife in all the time since the accident. The week of Peter’s death, Jonathan was scheduled to have a math test that he knew he couldn’t possibly pass. That Sunday evening, before he climbed into bed, he prayed to God: “God, if you just get me out of this math test, I will never ask you for anything else again. Just help me this once, please.” We didn’t go to school that week after the accident, and when we finally did, Jon’s math test was long forgotten.

As Jon sat in his room, as he watched neighbors enter to dismantle Peter’s brass bed and carry it out to be stored in the barn, as the slow days went by and he tried to comprehend what had taken place, an awful realization dawned on him: God had answered his prayer. God had heard his selfish request and had granted it by killing Peter.