Children of God

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

Rain falls on everyone, lightning strikes some. What cannot be changed is best forgotten. God made the world, and He saw that it was good. Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect. Good.

Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.

Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

You know, I’ve always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.

The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.

Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross.

She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love. He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.

Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism.

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. (15)

It is a scholar’s task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it’s no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you’re considering?

Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)

My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.

Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’,” he said one night, after a few drinks. “Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Perfect Compassion and Perfect Justice. Or maybe,” he suggested, slouching back in his chair and favoring her with a lopsided, wily grin, “maybe God is exactly as advertised in the Torah. Maybe, along with all its other truths and beauties, Judaism preserves for each generation of us the reality of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses—the God of Jesus.” A cranky, uncanny God, D.W. called Him. “A God with quirky, unfathomable rules, a God who gets fed up with us and pissed off! But quick to forgive, Sofia, and generous,

And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?

God's got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you're just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.

the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.

...trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly’s wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that’s so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It

You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man’s vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.

Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)

Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it’s God who’s failed us!

Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia Mendes did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life’s normal condition. So, as the first weeks after the massacre passed, she simply counted herself lucky to be among others who did not weep and wail for the dead.

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?” He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.

Once I told Ha�anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, �Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.�

After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.