My Mother’s God

My mother’s God has written the best of the protestant proverbs: you make the bed you lie in it; God helps him who helps himself. He tends to shy away from churches, is more to be found in phone calls to daughters or rain clouds over rusty grass. The Catholics have got him wrong entirely: too much waving the arms about, the incense and caftan, that rainbow light. He’s leaner than that, lean as a pair of grocer’s scales, hard as a hammer at cattle sales the third and final time of asking. His face is most clear in a scrubbed wooden table or deep in the shine of a laminex bench. He’s also observed at weddings and funerals by strict invitation, not knowing quite which side to sit on. His second book, my mother says, is often now too well received; the first is where the centre is, tooth for claw and eye for tooth whoever tried the other cheek? Well, Christ maybe, but that’s another story. God, like her, by dint of coursework has a further degree in predestination. Immortal, omniscient, no doubt of that, he nevertheless keeps regular hours and wipes his feet clean on the mat, is not to be seen at three in the morning. His portrait done in a vigorous charcoal is fixed on the inner curve of her forehead. Omnipotent there in broad black strokes he does not move. It is not easy, she’d confess, to be my mother’s God.