Jacob Have I Loved Religion Quotes

I did not pray any more. I had even stopped going to church. At first I thought my parents would put up a fight when one Sunday morning I just didn't come back from the crab house in time for church. My grandmother lit into me at suppertime, but to my surprise my father quietly took my part. I was old enough, he said, to decide for myself. When she launched into prophecies of eternal damnation he told her that God was my judge, not they. He meant it as a kindness, for how could he know that God had judged me before I was born and had cast me out before I took my first breath. I did not miss church, but sometimes I wished I might pray. I wanted, oddly enough, to pray for Call. I was so afraid he might die in some alien ocean thousands of miles from home. (15.40)

"Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?" my grandmother was crying out as I came into the back door. We were used to Grandma reading the Bible to us, but the selections were not usually quite so purple. I didn't even understand what it was all about until Grandma, seeing that I had come in, said, "Tell that viperish adulteress to listen to God's Word!" And proceeded to read on into chapter seven, which details the seduction of a young man by a "strange woman."

I looked down at my poor mother, struggling to pull several leaves of bread out of the oven. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Susan Bradshaw as a scarlet woman? It's a joke, get it? (16.11-12)

It was, ironically, the news of Hiroshima that made our lives easier. My grandmother, catching somehow the ultimate terror that the bomb promised, turned from adultery to Armageddon. We were all admonished to fight the whore of Babylon, who was somehow identified in Grandma's mind with the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, and repeatedly warned to prepare to meet our God. A rapid scurrying through her well-worn Bible and she had located several passages to shake over our heads—telling us of the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood. How could she know that the Day of the Lord's Anger was an almost welcome relief from her accusations of lust and adultery There never had been any Catholics on Rass, and the end of all things was, after all, almost unimaginable and therefore had far less power to shake one's core. (16.21)