Free The Feel of Steel by Helen Garner

Testament in his shirt pocket wherever he went, and kept the big fat Bible beside him on the dining room table while we ate. I hated this. The book seemed to radiate an ominous, reproachful righteousness. I knew he would have liked to say grace, so as soon as I put the food on the table I picked up my fork and started to eat, to deny himthe pleasure. Secretly I longed for grace – to hear it, say it, receive it – but I was too proud to admit to him that my heart was broken, that I was all smashed up inside. And I was damned if I would let him preach to me from his horrible black book.
    In our loneliness, that year, the Quick-Eze man and I used to read aloud to each other. His mild suggestion, once, was the Acts of the Apostles. I stonewalled him, and insisted on Conrad or Henry James. That Easter we sat every day on the famous Oak Lawn in the Botanic Gardens and read The Europeans . It was good, but now I wish I hadn’t been so dictatorial and defensive. Years later, when I was happier, I saw Fred Schepisi’s movie Evil Angels , based on John Bryson’s excellent book about the Azaria Chamberlain case. The scene where Meryl Streep and Sam Neill, as Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, lie in bed reading the Bible aloud together, for comfort, filled me with silent longing.

    There was a time when it comforted me to see a daggy sign on the front of a fundamentalist church in Newtown: ‘G OD LOVES YOU, WITH ALL YOUR TROUBLES .’ Even now there are days, as I go about my business along certain streets, when my past cruelties, my foolishnesses, my harsh egotisms hang around me like a fog – or, rather, when they haunt me like a pack of cards which offer themselves to my consciousness one by one and witha clever appropriateness, as if a tormentor’s mind were actively choosing and shuffling them, so that their juxtapositions are forever fresh, always bright and with a honed, unbearable edge. Because of this I understand and treasure the Bible’s repeated imagery of water, of washing; and of the laying down or the handing over of burdens. I like the story of the woman at the well. First, she was a woman. She belonged to the wrong race. She had had five husbands and was living with a man she was not married to, but she was the one Jesus asked to draw water for him. She bandied words with him, but he told her about the other kind of water – the sort that never runs out – the water that he was offering.

    The Quick-Eze man once said to me, and now I know what he meant, ‘Communion – I’d crawl over broken glass to get to it.’ It’s quite simple. You examine yourself, formally, in calm and serious words, together with everyone else in the building; you acknowledge that you have, well, basically stuffed things up again; in the name of Christ you are formally forgiven; and then they say to you, formally, ‘Come up here now, and we’ll give you something to eat and drink.’

    In Ingmar Bergman’s memoir The Magic Lantern , he visits a church with his aged father, a clergyman. The pastor of the church announces that he is too ill to conduct the communion service.
    â€˜Father started rising from the pew. He was upset. “I must speak to that creature. Let me pass.” He got out of the pew and limped into the sacristy, leaning heavily on his stick. A short and agitated conversation ensued. A few minutes later, the churchwarden appeared. He smiled in embarrassment and explained that there would be a communion service. An older colleague would assist the pastor.
    â€˜The introductory hymn was sung by the organist and the few churchgoers. At the end of the second verse, Father came in, in white vestments and with his stick. When the hymn was over he turned to us and said in his calm free voice: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most high.”
    â€˜Thus I was given the end of