Mister God, This is Anna. Papas
In a moment or two she shouted out, ‘A bee flaps its wings such-and-such times a second.’ Nobody believed her, but she was only a few counts out.
Every sound that could be captured was captured. Meals began to be punctuated with such remarks as, ‘Do you know a mosquito flaps its wings so many times a second? or a fly so many times a second?’
All these games led inevitably to making music. Each separate note had by this time been examined minutely, and a sound depended on how many times it wiggled per second. Soon she was making little melodies to which I added the harmonies. Little pieces of music entitled ‘Mummy’, ‘Mr Jether’s Dance’, and ‘Laughter’ soon began to echo around the house. Anna had begun to compose. I suppose Anna only had one problem in her little life – the lack of hours per day. There was too much to do, too many exciting things to find out.
Another of Anna’s magic carpets was the microscope. It revealed a little world made big. A world of intricate shape and pattern, a world of creatures too small to see with the naked eye; even the very dirt itself was wonderful.
Before all this adventuring into these hidden worlds, Mister God had been Anna’s friend and companion, but now, well this was going a bit too far. If Mister God had done all this, he was something larger than Anna had bargained for. It needed a bit of thinking about. For the next few weeks activity slowed down; she still played with the other children in the street; she was still as sweet and exciting as ever, but she became more inward-looking, more inclined to sit alone, high in the tree in the yard, with only Bossy as her companion. Whichever way she looked there seemed to be more and more of everything.
During these few weeks Anna slowly took stock of all she knew, walking about gently touching things as if looking for some clue that she had missed. She didn’t talk much in this period. In reply to questions she answered as simply as she could, apologizing for her absence by the gentlest of smiles, saying without words, ‘I’m sorry about all this. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve sorted this little puzzle out.’ Finally the whole thing came to a head.
She turned to me. ‘Can I come to bed with you tonight?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Now,’ she replied.
She hopped off my lap, took my hand, and pulled me to the door. I went.
I haven’t told you Anna’s way of solving problems, have I? If Anna was confronted with a situation that didn’t come out easily, there was only one thing to do – take your clothes off. So there we were in bed, the street lamp lighting up the room, her head cupped in her hands, and both elbows firmly planted on my chest. I waited. She chose to remain like that for about ten minutes, getting her argument in its proper order, and then she launched forth.
‘Mister God made everything, didn’t he?’
There was no point in saying that I didn’t really know. I said ‘Yes.’
‘Even the dirt and the stars and the animals and the people and the trees and everything, and the pollywogs?’ The pollywogs were those little creatures that we had seen under the microscope.
I said, ‘Yes, he made everything.’
She nodded her agreement. ‘Does Mister God love us truly?’
‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘Mister God loves everything.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well then, why does he let things get hurt and dead?’ Her voice sounded as if she felt she had betrayed a sacred trust, but the question had been thought and it had to be spoken.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘There’s a great many things about Mister God that we don’t know about.’
‘Well then,’ she continued, ‘if we don’t know many things about Mister God, how do we know he loves us?’
I could see that this was going to be one of those times, but thank goodness she didn’t expect an answer to her question for she hurried on: ‘Them pollywogs, I could love them till I bust, but they wouldn’t know, would they? I’m million times bigger than they are and Mister God is million times bigger than me, so how do I know what Mister God does?’
She was silent for a little while. Later I thought that at this moment she was taking her last look at babyhood. Then she went on:
‘Fynn, Mister God doesn’t love us.’ She hesitated. ‘He doesn’t really, you know, only people can love. I love Bossy, but Bossy don’t love me. I love the polly-wogs, but they don’t love me. I love you, Fynn, and you love me, don’t you?’
I tightened my arm about her.
‘You love me because you are people. I love Mister God truly, but he don’t love me.’
It sounded to me like a death-knell. ‘Damn and blast,’ I thought. ‘Why does this have to happen to people? Now she’s lost everything.’ But I was wrong. She had got both feet planted firmly on the next stepping-stone.
‘No,’ she went on, ‘no, he don’t love me, not like you do, it’s different, it’s millions of times bigger.’
I must have made some movement or noise for she levered herself upright and sat on her haunches and giggled. Then she launched herself at me and undid my little pang of hurt, cut out the useless spark of jealousy with the delicate sureness of a surgeon.
‘Fynn, you can love better than any people that ever was, and so can I, can’t I? But Mister God is different. You see, Fynn, people can only love outside and can only kiss outside, but Mister God can love you right inside, and Mister God can kiss you right inside, so it’s different. Mister God ain’t like us; we are a little bit like Mister God, but not much yet.’
It seemed to me to reduce itself to the fact that we were like God because of some similarities but God was not like us because of our difference. Her inner fires had refined her ideas, and like some alchemist she had turned lead into gold. Gone were all the human definitions of God, like Goodness, Mercy, Love and Justice, for these were merely props to describe the indescribable.
‘You see, Fynn, Mister God is different from us because he can finish things and we can’t. I can’t finish loving you because I shall be dead millions of years before I can finish, but Mister God can finish loving you, and so it’s not the same kind of love, is it? Even Mister Jether’s love is not the same as Mister God’s because he only came here to make us remember.’
The first salvo was enough for me; it all needed a bit of thinking about, but I wasn’t going to be spared the rest of her artillery.
‘Fynn, why do people have fights and wars and things?’
I explained to the best of my ability.
‘Fynn, what is the word for when you see it in a different way?’
After a minute or two scrabbling about, the precise phrase she wanted was dredged out of me, the phrase ‘point of view’.
‘Fynn, that’s the difference. You see, everybody has got a point of view, but Mister God hasn’t. Mister God has only points to view.’
At this moment my one desire was to get up and go for a long, long walk. What was this child up to? What had she done? In the first place, God could finish things off, I couldn’t. I’ll accept that, but what did it mean? It seemed to me that she had taken the whole idea of God outside the limitation of time and placed him firmly in the realm of eternity.
What about this difference between ‘a point of view’ and ‘points to view’? This stumped me, but a little further questioning cleared up the mystery. ‘Points to view’ was a clumsy term. She meant ‘viewing points’. The second salvo had been fired. Humanity in general had an infinite number of points of view, whereas Mister God had an infinite number of viewing points.