‘There. I’ve given them what they want: graduate-school glibness, flippant in its dismissiveness of the one thing needful.’ Angus rose from his desk. ‘The one thing needful is faith.’ However, he could not himself change the academy’s obsession with reputation. Only three months to go, he thought, and then I can escape from the academic rat-race. He had been accepted into theology at Trinity next semester, where he hoped to treat the human condition with the respect and temperance that the human spirit informed by scripture deserved. He wanted to serve others. Eyes shining, Celine had approved.
The sun itself was shining as Angus lowered himself and his backpack into the canoe beside the dock. He pushed off with his paddle and drifted out into the middle of the lake. A week before Thanksgiving, the day was a fitting epilogue to an extravagantly hot summer. The encircling woods were aflame with colour. A rocky hillock surmounted by evergreens was reflected in the still water. Reflections. Angus reflected. There were sermons in stones, said the Duke in As You Like It. Wordsworth’s spirituality had come from communion with nature. This was God’s lake long before it was Monaghan’s. Indigenous inhabitants had long known this. How could Man “possess” all this? The thought was alien to them; it should be to us. Somewhere nearby, a fish jumped and concentric rings fanned out across the lake’s untroubled surface. He smiled at a bad pun: the piece of cod which passeth understanding. The sun was already warm on his back when Angus reached deep within his pack to retrieve his prayer book. Then struck by the aptness of the opening lines of Psalm 19, he read them joyfully aloud to the solitude that was Creation:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handy-work… In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun; which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course. It goeth forth from the uttermost part of the heaven , and runneth about unto the end of it again; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
The sun as an agent of God, personified as a joyful bridegroom bringing light and warmth and life! The thought brought him such relief from the oppressive materialism of the night before. He stowed the book carefully in his pack, picked up his paddle, and made his way happily back to shore. On the dock, shading her eyes from the glare of the sun, Celine was waiting for him, her dress billowing gently, caught by a passing breeze. He applied himself to the paddle with alacrity and returned her radiant smile of welcome.
