My gaze fell fast, as though shot down, and I saw that I had arrived in my walk at the low wall of our little churchyard and that in front of me, on the other side of it, stood a man with a shovel in his hand and a serious smile on his face.

“Whereas I’m interested in this land down here,” he finished up, pointing at the damp, black earth that peeked through in many spots from beneath the withered leaves that were stirring noisily—while I hadn’t even realized a wind had come up.

Suddenly, seized by a powerful revulsion, I said, “Why are you doing that?”

The gravedigger continued to smile. “It’s a living,” he said, “and then too, most people do the same as I do, don’t you agree? They bury God up there the way I do people here.” He pointed up at the sky and explained to me, “That’s a big grave too. In the summer wild forget-me-nots grow on it—”

“There was a time,” I interrupted him, “when people buried God in heaven, that’s true.”

“Has that changed?” he asked with a strange sadness.

“At one time,” I continued, “everyone did throw a handful of heaven over Him, I know that. But at that point He actually wasn’t there anymore, or maybe He was . . .” I hesitated.

“You know,” I started up again, “in olden times, people used to pray like this.” I spread my arms out and felt my chest involuntarily expand.

At that time, God was casting Himself into all those abysses full of humility and darkness, and He would return only reluctantly to heaven, which, unnoticed, He was pulling down ever closer over the earth. But a new faith sprang up. And since this faith was unable to make people understand how its new God was different from the old one (since as soon as it began to praise Him, the people immediately recognized one and the same old God in this one too), the proclaimer of this new order changed the way of praying. He taught people how to join their hands and ruled as follows: “See, our God wants to be prayed to like this, so therefore He is different from the one that until now you believed you were receiving in your embrace.” The people accepted this, and the gesture of opening the arms came to be looked on with contempt and horror, and later it was fastened to the Cross to show it to everyone as a symbol of misery and death.