As It Is in Heaven

1

The enlightenment that comes from dreams is sometimes more potent than that which comes in the daylight. When Stephen lifted his head, Gabriella was lying in his arms on the rug on the floor before the fire. He was bathed in the sweat of his dream and drew back the blanket that covered them, to be reassured by the coolness of the morning. He turned towards Gabriella and watched the sleeping body of her and heard across the cottage the infant noises of Alannah sounding in her crib. There was a thin drizzle falling in the stillness outside.

It was some moments before the dream had left Stephen. He lay on the floor of the cottage, and Gabriella stirred beside him, and he leaned over and kissed the top of her head. Then he rose and walked out of the room and lifted Alannah and brought her back and placed her into the warmth of her mother. And he turned on Puccini's music and then lay down beneath the blanket once more.

The music rose. And for the first time Stephen heard not grief but an aching joy. He heard in that music the long-enduring love of his father, which had been undiminished by tragedy and had carried on like a difficult faith through all the lonely days of his living. He heard the victory of Love over Death. And while the music played on and washed over the three of them like grace, Stephen Griffin knew something of the puzzles of the world and understood that all love did not perish and could survive beyond pain and hardship and loneliness; and in that innocent vision with which he was gifted that morning he saw that the world fit together, each piece in its proper place, like the pieces on a chessboard, and that though the patterns that emerged were complex and difficult and grew more so all the time, there was a design nonetheless, for though we live in the impotency of our dreams to make better the world, the earth and its stars spin through the heavens at the rate of our loving and is made meaningful only in the way in which we give ourselves to each other.

Stephen saw. He saw and understood the way you do in the middle of a chess game when the openings have been played and the position takes on a beauty that belongs neither to one player nor to the other but is the perfect expression of both. He lay on the floor in the cottage and knew now that he would live with Gabriella without being afraid. That in the puzzle of love he was for her and Alannah, and they for him, and that what had happened so far was no more than the opening movement of the pieces.

He turned to Gabriella. The drizzle was falling. She reached and touched his face, then they moved closer together and held the child between them.