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week without rain—‘and sure it’s a miracle.’ Mrs Daly has twins—‘and sure it’s a miracle.’ Liam Dooley gets a girl in trouble—‘and sure it’s a miracle.’” Finn pushed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “Mind you, that might be a miracle,” he said.
Caitlin smiled in the shadow of her bowed head and black cascade of hair. Her father’s outbursts were rarely more than surges on a restless sea.
“The real miracle is that there are no miracles,” Finn went on. “The church has got people so they can’t think straight.” Finn reached a taper towards the fire but did not light it. He looked at Caitlin instead and said, “If I were a doctor and you were ill, and I gave you a piece of sugar and said, ‘Here, take this, it’ll make you better’—or even more, if I gave you a box full of little pieces of sugar and said, ‘Here, take one of these three times a day, they’ll make you better’—and you believed me because I’m a doctor, and did what I told you because you’re a good girl, and you got better of your illness, you’d come and thank me. ‘Without your pills, doctor, I’d never have got better.’ And as I pocket the fee for my services I’d say—to myself of course—‘How stupid that woman is. All I gave her was sugar. The cure was in herself all the time and she didn’t know it.’”
Finn lit the taper and held it to the pipe in his mouth. He let the smoke escape in puffs. “God is a placebo,” he said, “a mere piece of sugar. If a man put as much faith in himself as he puts in God, he’d work miracles every day.”
Finn leaned back in his chair and smoked his pipe.
Caitlin went on with her sewing in silence. Young Joe-Joe Carney’s recovery from a pneumonia that should have killed him had made a strong impression on her. Dr Starkey himself had stated it was God’s goodness and the power of prayer that had saved the little boy’s life. Even the Reverend Angus Anderson, the Presbyterian minister, agreed that God did appear indeed to have been moved by Father Padraig’s call to prayer. The village had talked about nothing else for days.
Caitlin’s religious doubts began to weaken. There had to be a God. Without God phenomena like the beauty of the earth, like the awesomeness of the universe, like life itself, were inexplicable. And what other explanation was there for Joe-Joe Carney’s recovery when the doctor himself had abdicated his role as healer and placed the patient in the hands of God?
“Medicine uses human ability and human knowledge,” Dr Starkey, himself a deacon in the Reverend Angus Anderson’s church, had told Caitlin with admirable candour. “We know how limited they are. Your father would say they are all we have. As a Christian I disagree with your father.
Libros Libertad 