Read Online Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy - Free Book Online Page B

Emma’s birth, six years earlier, in the Maternity Suite at the local hospital. Ben seemed finally to grasp the enormity of what was planned, his eyes had reddened, but the seriousness, the methodical ritual of events seemed to keep any terror in check. They had debated allowing him to watch, to participate, but even now, at the point of no return, there was surely something less terrifying, and certainly less bloody, about this occasion for him than there had been at his sister’s birth, when her strange alien-being seemed to burst from his mother’s innards. Linda felt that for his peace of mind later, as an adult, he should be a participant, he should be there. He listened quietly as they explained the last few steps, he kissed his father, and lay on top of him.
    And so they lay together, a last few minutes of handholding, and tears, before separating. Emma seemed less concerned than her brother. Her clear contentment, lying there, clutching his hand, forced the last doubts from Rick’s mind, and induced a parallel contentment in him. His heart pounded, but the flow of his thoughts was suddenly calm and steady. Even Linda felt that her daughter’s serenity somehow cancelled out, at least for the moment, whatever misery she and her surviving child would subsequently endure.
    When her husband was ready, she nodded, and pressed her face softly onto his, and he squeezed his own syringe, and waited, holding them all, but not for any length of time.

AFTERWORD
    While much of what I have written becomes unreadable or embarrassing as it recedes into the past, a few things, at least, seem to move in the opposite direction, improving with age. Perhaps this is to meet the requirements of some unknown physical law, a conservation of achievement that requires an average mediocrity. If enough bad writing is written, an equal and opposite amount of good must therefore arise? If so, I should try to write more badly, more often.
    Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam
has passed my personal test of time — so far. One reason a story or poem might avoid disillusioning is that it refuses to have its meanings exhausted by rereading; it will not allow the reader (and the writer is the first reader) to be bored. It continues to yield crops, including some from seeds which weren’t consciously sown at the time of writing. I haven’t exhausted
Sunbeam
— I still see new things in it.
    Today I thought I saw this: the worship of family is a deep and nourishing religious practice. In our secular society, we might pretend to believe in very little — but of course we believe in much, even if we keep our deepest and most sacred beliefs hidden from ourselves. The urge to religious belief is hot-wired into us according to the anthropologist Walter Burkert. In his book,
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion,
Burkert traces how religious belief takes similar forms (e.g. sacrifice) in different cultures. Like our sexual impulses, our religious beliefs resist the attempts of local culture to suppress them, although cultural pressure always deforms these biological imperatives into interesting and unique local shapes, going by the names of (say) Christianity, or Animism, or Islam, or even High Church Modernism.
    I’ve explored this in a little more detail in two essays — ‘The Biology of Literature’, and ‘Waiting for the Martians’ in my collection of essays,
Navel Gazing.
    When other gods fail, there is still the worship of family, and the household gods of this last surviving religion are its children. But what happens when those cute gods fail? Family worship takes many forms — from the sentimental pieties of Hollywood, to the countless automatic rituals and routines that deeply nourish domestic life. In us we trust? The line from a John Berryman poem has always echoed in my head. The sacredness of family is also surely hot-wired into us, if partly for the usual genetically selfish reasons. What blood sacrifices might be