August is a wicked month.
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.
What matters is the imaginative truth.
In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.
Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.