The priest made no reply. He was striding ahead looking into the eyes of his charge and longing to give his little round cheeks another kiss. Finally he gave in, lifted his nephew to his face, and gave him a big kiss.

The father cried: ‘Here Father, you want one? You just say the word, mate.’

As farmers will, they started in on the crude old jokes. As soon as they sat down to eat, ponderous humour produced gales of laughter in the countryfolk. The two other sons were also soon to be married. After the ceremony, their fiancées had come to join them for the meal. The guests made constant allusion to the generations to come that were heralded by these happy unions. Unremitting earthy banter couched in even coarser language made the blushing girls giggle and the men, yelling and pounding the table, fall off their chairs, laughing. The father and grandfather kept the jokes coming, every one a filthy gem. The mother smiled, the old folk joined in the ribaldry and put in the odd crack themselves.

The priest, used to these Brueghelesque scenes, was sitting next to the nurse and tickling his nephew’s lips to make him laugh. He seemed astonished by the sight of this child as if he had never properly seen one before. He looked at him with close attention and a deep, thoughtful seriousness. Mingled with it was a tenderness itself new born within him, and not felt by him before – an intense and poignant tenderness towards this fragile little creature who was his brother’s son.

Oblivious of his surroundings, he contemplated the child. He would have liked to pick him up again and put him on his lap. He could still feel against his chest and within his heart the sweet sensation of carrying him earlier, back from the church. In his contemplation of this miniature of a man, he was moved as if by some ineffable mystery unprecedented in his life, a holy, sacred mystery which was the incarnation of a new soul. Here in essence was the great mystery of burgeoning life; of love awakening and with it the survival of mankind; the onward march of humanity.

The nurse in mid-feast, her face red and her eyes gleaming, was having difficulty reaching the table with the baby in her lap. The priest said to her: ‘Give him to me. I’m not hungry.’

And again, he picked up the child. Once more, for him, all else faded and then disappeared from view. He gazed at the chubby, pink face and gradually the warmth of the little body through its swaddling and through the cloth of his own cassock reached his lap and came through to him as a very light, very chaste and delicious caress, so full of goodness that his eyes filled with tears.