purephase

"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 complcated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out..."

"It must sometimes be a comfort to a soldier that the atrocities on either side were equal: nobody was ever alone."

On another note, having spent some time over the past weeks taking in situational comedys, I have come to realize that the majority of the situations would not be funny at all if people would only speak the truth. I wonder what facet of our personalities allows us to laugh at lies while simultaneously ignoring sadness, pain, and death. We are in a world of contradictions.