Quoting…

 Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk,  An Expedition to the Pole,  p43  

    God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him.  God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars.  It is a life with God which demands these things.

     Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates.  You do not have to do these things; not at all.  God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot.  You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God.  They work on you, not on him.

     You do not have to sit outside in the dark.  If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary.  But the stars neither require nor demand it.

And from page 52,

      Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the absolute? …

      On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.   

I really should have saved this one for the cruise – I am finding this one mentally stimulating.  I admire the way an author like Dillard works with words, forming with them all forms of art, almost visual in the way it leaves it’s impression on me.  Sometimes I find I have to go back and re-read portions as if I was moving in closer to a painting to catch some detail or moving around a sculpture to see it from yet another angle.