On God: An Uncommon Conversation Read Online Free PDF

Some people are maniacs on motorcycles—what do they get from it? Something not ordinary. Partly from this life—they’re curing hostilities, aggressions, and rages they can only solve on a motorcycle that is going fast on a wet road. But maybe it also derives from a previous life when they were terrified of any commitment to danger. Perhaps the soul is now turning over the soil of previous arid endeavors.
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    So many people who believe in reincarnation have self-aggrandizing memories of the past—“Oh, I was in Cleopatra’s court.”
    I can’t bear that.
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    It kind of put me off reincarnation.
    Yes, that particular vanity is atrocious. It’s unpleasant in the same manner that people who are devout Christians believe they’re going to Heaven because they’re steadfast in their belief. Either way, it is self-aggrandizement.
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    At the end of
Ancient Evenings,
which I’ve been rereading over the last few days, Meni the Second, the young Meni, says, “Purity and goodness are less to Osiris than strength,” which is a restatement of what Cherry says in
An American Dream:
“God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well.” Add to that Rojack’s belief that “God was not love but courage. Love came only as a reward.” You return to this idea many times in your books—especially in
Harlot’s Ghost.
I can see the force of this idea, but couldn’t it be argued that love can create strength just as courage generates love?
    Yes, it can be argued. It is still a question, however. Does love have as powerful and vital an effect as courage? There are any number of men and women who are full of love but are nonetheless timid and cowardly and hate themselves for being cowardly—it poisons the love in them, even if, essentially, they are loving creatures.
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    In Christian belief, love can move mountains. But for you, love seems to be more of a passive quality, not active like courage—love comes as a “reward”—so it isn’t seen as an active principle. It’s the emolument you get for being courageous.
    Let me tell you how I got to that point. It struck me that everyone I knew, including myself, was always looking for love. “Ah, if I could find love, it would solve my problems.” Some years ago, however, I found myself saying to my children, “Don’t go searching for love. Love is not a solution but a reward.” So long as you go searching for love directly, you will fail. Because love is a grace, and you don’t pursue grace. Now, mind you, I’m not a macho maniac on courage. More than once I’ve said that an old lady who crosses a busy street in terror, feeling she hardly has a fifty-fifty chance of making it safely across, is exhibiting courage that might be more intense than that of a professional soldier attacking a machinegun nest, if through all his young manhood he’s been ready to die in such an action. Odds are that such a soldier is braver even on balance than the average old lady, but we can’t set up a hierarchy concerning courage.
    Still, my own experience tells me that to the degree one is brave, one finds more love than when one is cowardly.
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    But I’m not talking about romantic love, rather about what Christianity calls “charity.”
    Charity comes when you’re brave. How many cowards are full of charity? Cowardice is a poison.
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    It’s a question of precedence. You always put courage as the more active, the more powerful—
    I often find when I’m feeling weak that I’m also very nice, and when I’m weak I feel the weakness in others and am sympathetic to it. But it’s not nourishing. It can be just another form of emptiness