'Or perhaps it went the other way'

He gradually realized—with an emptiness that seized him with six hands—that he had called in the broker to find him a bride because he was incapable of doing it himself. This terrifying insight he had derived as a result of his meeting and conversation with Lily Hirschorn. Her probing questions had somehow irritated him into revealing—to himself more than her—the true nature of his relationship to God, and from that it had come upon him, with shocking force, that apart from his parents, he had never loved anyone. Or perhaps it went the other way, that he did not love God so well as he might, because he had not loved man. It seemed to Leo that his whole life stood starkly revealed and he saw himself for the first time as he truly was—unloved and loveless.

—Bernard Malamud, "The Magic Barrel," The Magic Barrel (1958)

Hate was just a failure of imagination

Sometimes instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, "What is God like?" and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion...But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery -- that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said "Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?" and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.

 *     *     *

He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity -- that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

--Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

'My personal idea of God'

SHANNON

So the next Sunday when I climbed into the pulpit and looked down over all of those smug, disapproving, accusing faces uplifted, I had an impulse to shake them—so I shook them. I had a prepared sermon—meek, apologetic—I threw it away, tossed it into the chancel. Look here, I said, I shouted, I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this, this . . . this. . . . 

HANNAH

[quietly]

Senile delinquent? 

SHANNON

Yeah, this angry, petulant old man. I mean he's represented like a bad-tempered childish old, old, sick, peevish man—I mean like the sort of old man in a nursing home that's putting together a jigsaw puzzle and can't put it together and gets furious at it and kicks over the table. Yes, I tell you they do that, all our theologies do it—accuse God of being a cruel, senile delinquent, blaming the world and brutally punishing all he created for his own faults in construction, and then, ha-ha, yeah—a thunderstorm broke that Sunday. . . . 

HANNAH

You mean outside the church? 

SHANNON

Yep, it was wilder than I was! And out they slithered, they slithered out of their pews to their shiny black cockroach sedans, ha-ha, and I shouted after them, hell, I even followed them halfway out of the church, shouting after them as they. . . . [He stops with a gasp for breath.] 

HANNAH

Slithered out? 

SHANNON

I shouted after them, go on, go home and close your house windows, all your windows and doors, against the truth about God! 

HANNAH

Oh, my heavens. Which is just what they did—poor things. 

SHANNON

Miss Jelkes honey, Pleasant Valley, Virginia was an exclusive suburb of a large city and these poor things were not poor—materially speaking. 

HANNAH

[smiling a bit]

What was the, uh, upshot of it? 

SHANNON

Upshot of it? Well, I wasn't defrocked. I was just locked out of the church in Pleasant Valley, Virginia, and put in a nice little private asylum to recuperate from a complete nervous breakdown as they preferred to regard it, and then, and then I . . . I entered my present line—tours of God's world conducted by a minister of God with a cross and a round collar to prove it. Collecting evidence! 

HANNAH

Evidence of what, Mr. Shannon? 

SHANNON

[a touch slyly now]

My personal idea of God, not as a senile delinquent, but as a. . . . 

HANNAH

Incomplete sentence.

—Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana (1961)

'a morbid surge of the love that terrified him'

His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.

He was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be used. He had seen it transform in cases where nothing else had worked, such as with his poor sister. None of this had the least bearing on his situation. The love that would overcome him was of a different order entirely. It was not the kind that could be used for the child’s improvement or his own. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant. And it only began with Bishop. It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated.

—Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

The Way of Love

For the activity and clear proof of perfect love towards God is a genuine disposition of voluntary goodwill towards one's neighbor. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, says the divine Apostle John, cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20). This is the way of truth, as the Word of God calls himself, that leads those who walk in it, pure of all passions, to God the Father. This is the door, through which the one who enters finds himself in the Holy of Holies, and is made worthy to behold the unapproachable beauty of the holy and royal Trinity.

—Maximus the Confessor, "Letter 2: On Love" (626)

'the enunciation of the rabbis'

Mother, Rabbi Warshaw is a fat, pompous, impatient fraud, with an absolutely grotesque superiority complex, a character out of Dickens is what he is, someone who if you stood next to him on the bus and didn't know he was so revered, you would say, "That man stinks to high heaven of cigarettes," and that is all you would say. This is a man who somewhere along the line got the idea that the basic unit of meaning in the English language is the syllable. So no word he pronounces has less than three of them, not even the word God. You should hear the song and dance he makes out of Israel. For him it's as long as refrigerator! And do you remember him at my bar mitzvah, what a field day he had with Alexander Portnoy? Why, Mother, did he keep calling me by my whole name? Why, except to impress all you idiots in the audience with those syllables! And it worked! It actually worked! . . . "I-a wan-tt to-a wel-come-a you-ew tooo thee sy-no-gawg-a." Oh God, oh Guh-ah-duh, if you're up there shining down your countenance, why not spare us from here on out the enunciation of the rabbis! Why not spare us the rabbis themselves! Look, why not spare us religion, if only in the name of our human dignity!

—Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

People Took Refuge in the Banal

Once, long ago, she'd allowed herself to think seriously about what human beings would do, confronted directly with a sign of God's presence in their lives. The Bible, that repository of Western wisdom, was instructive either as myth or as history, she'd decided. God was at Sinai and within weeks, people were dancing in front of a golden calf. God walked in Jerusalem and days later, folks nailed Him up and then went back to work. Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

--Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996)

Nothing is simpler than love.

Nothing is simpler for man than the act of love, which in this case can indeed dispense with every precaution and care since the self-surrender to the person one adores is at the same time self-surrender to the promise of eternal bliss and, as such, is an act which could never be surpassed by a greater or a better. When one's beloved is none other than God, the ego's experience of losing the ground under its feet as a result of genuine love is none other than the beatific shudder of self-surrender which every believer is basically disposed to experience and which the mystic actually experiences already here on earth.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (1961) 

We are spontaneously idolatrous

All human beings have their hearts set somewhere, hold something sacred, worship at some shrine. We are spontaneously idolatrous—where, by ‘idolatry’, I mean the worship of some creature, the setting of the heart on some particular thing (usually oneself). For most of us there is no single creature that is the object of our faith. Our hearts are torn, dispersed, distracted. We are (to use the seventeenth-century term) polytheists. And none of us is so self-transparent as to know quite where, in fact, our hearts are set.

Against this background, the great religious traditions can be seen as contexts in which human beings may learn, however slowly, partially, imperfectly, some freedom from the destructive bondage which the worship of the creature brings.

 —Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of 'Religion' (1996)

What is Good in Itself

St. Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist—for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

—Flannery O'Connor, "Catholic Novelists and Their Readers" (1969)

Liza Hamilton

“I’m late, Mother,” Samuel said.

She did not look around at him. Her spatula moved like a striking snake and the hot cakes settled their white sides hissing on the soapstone. “What time was it you came home?” she asked.

“Oh, it was late—late. Must have been near eleven. I didn’t look, fearing to waken you.”

“I did not waken,” Liza said grimly. “And maybe you can find it healthy to rove all night, but the Lord God will do what He sees fit about that.” It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

This Rhythm of What Passes Away

The final note is, at first hearing, the rhythm of what is passing away. To be sure, the creaturely is a "cascading torrent" ("a torrent...is gathered, overflows, thunders, runs and in running runs off," [Augustine]); indeed, one could even say that it only "was" or "will be," but never "is" ("before they might be they are not, and when they are they are fleeing away, and when they have fled they no longer are," [Augusgtine]). But it is just this "passing away" that gives the "whole" its particular resonance: just as a spoken work of art depends upon each verse, each syllable, each letter "passing away."...The only appropriate posture, then, is that of "flowing with what flows" to the point of an ever more rapid "trickling away."

But the final clarification of this "rhythm of what passes away" is based in this: that this rhythm is, more profoundly, a manifestation of the mystery of God: the God who works through and sustains this rhythm in its entirety; the God who hereby joins its "nothingness" to an "is"...

—Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis (1932)

'this fury to deface'

The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what grave-stones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich, forgotten timber merchant. It was odd—this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

—Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

your light is not in yourselves

If...you are illuminated by drawing near to him and darkened by withdrawing, your light was not in yourselves but in your God... If you live by drawing near to him and die by withdrawing, your life was not in yourselves. For that which is your life is the same as that which is your light.

—Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 19:11 (419)

Seek His Face Evermore

Ut inveniendus quaeratur, occultus est; ut inventus quaeratur, immensus est. Unde alibi dicitur, ‘Quaerite faciem ejus semper’.

—Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 63:1 (419)

He is hidden in order that you might seek him; and in order that you might not cease in your search once you have found him, he is infinite. Thus it is said . . . “Seek his face evermore”.(Psalm 105:4).

—Translation by John Betz, "Beyond the Sublime" (2006)

Maybe Awful Things Is How God Speaks To Us

Vernon studied his father in the milky light, searching for something in his face, or the way he held his body, that was evidence of the good man he knew as a child. If God didn't want Mr. Augusto dead, why'd he let Pop kill him? With all the killing in the world, did one more man really matter?

Vernon crossed the room and crawled from the shimmering cavern. Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel.  Maybe folks don't trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God's got to remind us he's alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.

--Alan Heathcock, "Smoke," Volt (2011)

Thoroughly Pervaded with His Power

When the soul is drawn into the immediate presence of God and is thoroughly pervaded with His power, it becomes like fire, and in this state of glory takes on the appearance of a new higher spirit, a higher nature. When pure fire penetrates a pure metal with its heat, the metal loses its massiveness and hardness, and at the same time gives forth light and warmth, without forfeiting it own essence. In some such way the substantial fire of the divinity penetrates the soul with a heat it irradiates, owing to which the soul loses, not its own nature, but its natural lowliness and ponderousness and is drawn up to God, to receive light and warmth resembling the divine heat.

—Matthias Scheeben, Nature and Grace (1861)

God is Known

The more specific ways in which God is known can be very different: at one moment, one might ascend from the perfections of finite things to the infinite source of all perfection; at another moment one might catch a glimpse of the majesty of the immutable shining through the flitting back and forth of mutable things; at another moment one’s experience of other persons may give one a lively sense of the personality of God as the fulfillment of everything we intimate in personal greatness; or, at yet another moment, we may happen to perceive in the restless activity of creation the ‘active repose and reposing activity’ of the Creator.

—Erich Przywara, Religionsphilosophische Schriften (1922)

theology means...

At the very least, theology means 'watching one's language in the presence of God.'

—Gerald O'Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer (2007)

What all the years?

Perhaps it is new, our surviving these: the year and love. Blossoms and fruit are ripe when they fall; animals are self-aware and find each other and are content with this. But we, who have undertaken God, can never finish. We keep putting off our nature, we need more time. What is a year to us? What all the years? Before we have even begun God, we are already praying to him: let us survive this night. And then the being ill. And then love.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)