As It Is in Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed convincing, and for as long as his vision remained the wildest and least probable
     of all dreams, the people indulged his fantasy and bought him drinks. Moses Mooney was a figure around the town, that was
     all. He did not tell anyone yet that the building was to be an opera house, nor that the music he had heard in God’s company
     was not like any other and that only later when he had arrived back on the shores of Brazil and heard on an old radio the
     singing of Maria Callas did he recognize that that was the music of God.
    How he intended to build the opera house was not at first clear to him either. All he knew was that he had to come home to
     Clare, that his travelling days were over, and that this project was what he had to pursue until the day that he died. When
     he arrived back at his home cottage, the roof had fallen in. There were two cats living in the parlour in a clump of old thatch,
     and when Moses stood in the doorway, they came to him with such gentleness and affection that he told his neighbour he would
     name them after his parents. It took him three months to get the house partially repaired. He had money saved from his sailoring,
     and before he had declared his full intentions, he used what he had left to buy an acre of ground next to the golf course
     at Spanish Point.
    And there it remained. The west Clare opera house. Grass grew within the barbed-wire boundaries of the field, while all about
     it were the fairways and greens of the golfers. Every day Moses would walk across the field and imagine the dimensions of
     the building shaping around him; from the whispering of the sea winds he dreamed the singing of the future, the magnificent
     music that was as yet unheard by everyone but himself.
    Other than this vision, Moses Mooney showed few signs of oddity in his behaviour. He was a churchgoing man and kept himself
     comfortably once he had repaired the cottage. He was the owner of a thousand tales and could tell them with such conviction
     that two priests, three bankers, and one insurance man were among his regular company in the late-evening sessions in Clancy’s.
     He had gone out into the world and brought more than his share of it back with him, and when he told of unknown tribes in
     Chile, the bizarre habits of the male cockatoo, or the weird majesty of a communal dream shared by each of eighty sailors
     one night after a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, no one walked away. He finished a story and sat back, palming his great
     beard gently, and then sipping his stout as if chastened by the things he had lived to see.
    It was two years after he had bought the field that the idea of the concerts came to him. When he first dreamed the opera
     house into the space where the tufts of grass blew in the wind, he did not think of how the money would be raised. It was
     only afterwards, when the emptiness of the field began to spread in his mind like an ache, that he wondered if there was not
     a serious flaw in God’s vision, or if perhaps he had resurfaced too soon in the southern Atlantic before getting the entire
     message. With the childlike innocence of the visionary, he had supposed that once he announced his intentions the money would
     be forthcoming. When it wasn’t and nobody stopped him on the street with the offer of finances, he decided that information
     was the problem, and stayed awake all the following night making three bright posters with red and yellow crayons, announcing
     the number of the bank account he had opened and telling the good people that he was going to donate his field and all his
     personal savings to the cause of building a place for music of the sea. He hung the posters the following day before dawn.
     The town was asleep and only a brisk salty wind passed along the street. Thomas and Angela, the two cats, had followed him
     from the house and stood together beneath the lamppost while he pressed home the thumbtacks. When he had done all three, he