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have a father on earth.
    All winter and far into spring there were readings about his Father in heaven, from devotional homilies each evening and from the
Book
of Sermons
on Sundays. His foster mother would assume a solemn, frozen expression and begin to read; she read in a chant that slackened at every pause, rather like a melody ending on a falling note; up and down, up and down, over and over again, until eventually the lesson came to an end. These readings had nothing to do with everyday life, and at other times, indeed, no one on the farm seemed to have any love for God or expect anything of Him except Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík. The brothers sprawled back during the lesson and sometimes kicked one another and cursed one another between their teeth, as each thought the other was in the way; the women stared wide-eyed into the blue as if all this great talk about God struck no answering chord in them. But then the foster mother’s sight began to fail, and little Óli was barely ten years old when he was given the task of reading the lesson on less important occasions. “What a lot of damned rubbish the brat talks!” the brothers would say during the reading, as if the boy himself were responsible for what the man in the
Book of Sermons
had written. On the other hand it was true that he never achieved his foster mother’s peculiar chant, far less the special expression on her face. But at least he understood God, and there was no one in that house who understood God except him. And though the devotional homilies were tedious and the
Book of Sermons
much worse, it did not matter, because Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík, you see, appreciated God not according to any devotional homily or
Book of Sermons,
not according to any gospel or doctrine, but in another and much more remarkable way.
    He was not quite nine years old, in fact, when he first began to have spiritual experiences. He would be standing down by the bay, perhaps, in the early days of spring, or up on the headland to the west of the bay where there was a mound with a rich green tussock on top, or perhaps up on the hill above the homefield when the grass was high and ready for mowing. Then suddenly he felt he saw God’s image open before him. He felt the deity reveal itself in Nature in an inexpressible music, the sonic revelation of the deity; and before he knew it he himself had become a trembling voice in a celestial chorus of glory. His soul seemed to be rising out of his body like frothing milk brimming over the edge of a basin; it was as if his soul were flowing into an unfathomable ocean of higher life, beyond words, beyond all perception, his body suffused by some surging light that was beyond all light. Sighing, he became aware of his own insignificance in the midst of this infinite chorus of glory and radiance; his whole consciousness dissolved into one sacred, tearful yearning to be allowed to be one with the Highest and be no longer any part of himself. He lay for a long time on the sand or on the grass, and wept tears of deep and fervent happiness, face to face with the inexpressible. “God, God, God!” he cried, trembling with love and reverence, and kissed the ground and dug his fingers into the turf. The feeling of well-being stayed with him after he began to come round; he went on lying there; he lay in a tranquil trance and felt that never again could there be any shadows in his life, that all adversity was merely chaff, that nothing could matter any more, that everything was good. He had perceived the One. His Father in heaven had taken him to His heart by the farthest northern seas.
    No one in the house had any suspicion that the boy was in direct communication with the deity, nor would anyone in the house have understood it. Everyone in the house went on listening to God’s Word out of a book. He alone knew that even if these people listened to God’s Word for a thousand years they would never understand God, and anyway it would probably