We were silent for a long moment. The wind picked up and swept down around us, and I let my hair blow across my face, breathed deeply of the sound that it carried, such a rushing sweetness. The grass around us curved in surrender. We bend, it sang. We bend and bow, breathe upon us.
‘I don’t want to use that book,’ I said eventually. I stared down at our clasped hands and, for a moment, could not tell my own fingers from hers. ‘I don’t know it. I don’t understand things like that.’
Thea looked up at me. Her eyes were red. ‘Maybe we could pray. We could ask God to keep us together.’
‘Here?’
‘No. In the Lord’s house. We could go back to the church.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Hanne, we need to do something.’
‘Not the church,’ I said. ‘It’s dead there.’ I remembered the feeling of divinity I had felt under the pines the night my father had preached, when Thea had turned around and looked at me. ‘I know where we can go.’
The wind blew us to the forest. Hand in hand, skirts buffeted against our legs, hair stringing out into the air above, we let ourselves be carried to the only cathedral we had known together. As soon as we stepped through the shield of pines, into their soft shadow and quiet green, I felt the holy in the air. The wind could not reach us in there, and the stillness on the forest floor, while the tops of the trees above us rushed, made the space seem protected. Sacred.
We reached the small, circular opening amongst the trees. Sunlight tolled down in its centre, a well of brightness on the thick floor of needles. I led Thea to it and faced her.
‘I feel like we ought to have a Bible,’ Thea whispered. ‘Like in a prayer meeting. Or worship.’
‘I know. I feel nervous.’
‘You’re trembling.’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘Here,’ Thea said. She bent and picked up two sticks which she placed on the ground nearby, one across the other. ‘This can be the altar.’
‘Is this blasphemous?’
‘No, we are building a church so that God may come amongst us and hear our prayer.’ She hesitated, glancing around us. ‘Hanne, what is singing to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Remember when you said the snow sounded holy? Let’s gather all the things here that sound hallowed. We’ll build our church from the music you can hear.’
I closed my eyes and listened. The wind was a ribbon of worship around the trees. ‘How do we gather the wind?’
‘We can raise our palms against it,’ Thea suggested.
I nodded. ‘The moss,’ I added. ‘The moss sounds sacred.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. And the lichen. It sounds like a note in harmony with everything else.’
I watched as Thea picked up a stone covered with moss and set it next to the crossed sticks. ‘What should I do with the lichen?’ she asked.
‘Maybe we can hold some.’
‘What else should we do?’ she asked softly.
‘I think we should kneel here, with the sun on our heads,’ I said.
We kneeled, facing one another, the altar next to us. The ground was soft. I could smell resin and conifer. Thea passed me a scratching of lichen and I held it in my left palm and raised my right hand to the air. Bible of breath. Thea did the same.
We closed our eyes.
‘Dear God,’ said Thea. ‘We pray that you hear us.’
The trees creaked above us. A pine cone fell from a height.
‘We yearn for our freedom,’ I added. ‘We pray that we will not be parted from one another.’
‘Please, dear Lord, let us stay together. No matter what happens.’
I felt Thea take the lichen from my hand and thread her fingers through my own. Somewhere above the forest canopy came the cry of a goshawk. Pine needles shivered in the shadows. Roots pushed into deeper soils.
‘Please, dear God,’ I whispered. ‘May we be with each other always.’
‘Yes,’ breathed Thea. ‘We pray this in Jesus’s name. Amen.’
I opened my eyes and saw that Thea was no longer bending her head in prayer but was looking at me intently.
For one strange moment I felt that I was on the verge of something important and that, if she did not look away, something rare and precious would happen. Branches would suddenly, noiselessly erupt into flame. Birds would fall out of the sky. Milk would run down the trunks of trees.
She closed her eyes. ‘“And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”’