“Does the life of faith ever get easier?” asked the student. “It must get easier as you move through life’s stages.”
The white-haired teacher laughed. “No, no. It only gets harder. Faith is a knife, and its job is to cut. Why would it stop cutting? That would mean it was dead. There’s always one more layer below the one that faith has just conquered, and some layers are tougher than others.”
“So this pain…”
“Do you want it or not?”
Not yet conscious, not yet human, but headed in that direction.
They worked you up in a glorious reeking haze, dulled senses unfeeling, and there you go. You were not planned, and neither was the act.
Can’t kick yet and can’t tell her you’ve come because at this point, she could just be late.
In eleven years, if you make it, you’ll earn the same reproductive rights to your own body that now drive a wedge between your mother’s interests and your own.
But for now, your mother says
FUCK YOU CHILD
You’re a nuisance and I hate you.
And god weeps in the atoms of the scalpels that slice you.
Perhaps doctrine is a necessary evil to give us a rational foundation on which to rest our hearts. It is our hearts, after all, that turn towards God or away from him.
In other words, if my mind is somewhat at rest in some sort of incomplete projection of who I think God is, it’s easier to surrender to him.
