We Have To Listen To

There Is Always Room For At Least Two Truths.

I Was Fascinated By The Lack Of A Word For A Parent Who Has Lost A Child. We Have No Word In English. I Thought For Sure There'd Be A Word In Irish But There Is None. And Then I Looked In Several Other Languages And Could Not Find One, Until I Found The Word Sh'khol In Hebrew. I'm Still Not Sure Why So Many Languages Don't Have A Word For This Sort Of Bereavement, This Shadowing.

Corrigan Told Me Once That Christ Was Quite Easy To Understand. He Went Where He Was Supposed To Go. He Stayed Where He Was Needed. He Took Little Or Nothing Along, A Pair Of Sandals, A Bit Of A Shirt, A Few Odds And Ends To Stave Off The Loneliness. He Never Rejected The World. If He Had Rejected It, He Would Have Been Rejecting Mystery. And If He Rejected Mystery, He Would Have Been Rejecting Faith.

I Love Short Stories. They're Like Small Imploding Universes. They Are Very Tightly Bound And Controlled. I'd Been Wanting To Write One For Ages But Just Got Tangled Up In Novels. The Novel Is The Same In The Sense That It Is Also A Universe, But It Explodes Outwards With All That Shrapnel Going In Several Different Directions. I Don't See Too Much Difference In The Forms Except For The Fact That Writing Short Stories Is Like Sprinting Rather Than Long-distance Running.

With All Respects To Heaven, I Like It Here.