On God: An Uncommon Conversation Read Online Free PDF Page B

traveling back and forth. Whereas when I’m feeling strong and also feel compassion or charity—on those rare occasions—there’s real goodness present. It’s of real use to the other person.
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    Well, to get down to basic ethics: When someone does something that’s an act of real generosity done at a cost to themselves, it’s because they love the other person. I don’t mean in a romantic or sexual way.
    I’m not putting that down, but I’m not ready to elevate it—because as a novelist, I know better. Forgive me for putting it this way, but most often when you have an act of great generosity, there’s a tangled skein behind it of good and bad motive—not to ignore the possible presence of God and the Devil. Contemplate the compromises, relations, treaties, surprises, and rebellions within any large personal act. People are also perfectly capable of rebelling against both God and the Devil, shutting them both out of one’s existence as far as possible. There is the human ego—the notion that neither God nor the Devil knows what He now wants of me as well as I know it. So I do call it a tripartite relationship, and by that I certainly don’t mean that humans are subservient in it. What terrifies me at times is that humans may become dominant over the other two. I just don’t trust us to go traveling across the universe on our own.
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    You mean there may have been some individuals in history who were so powerful at a certain moment in time, they equaled God and the Devil? Churchill, Napoleon—
    â€”Napoleon, yeah. I think certain humans can free themselves to the point where both God and the Devil are working for them for a brief period. But, please, take us back again to speculations I feel closer to.
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    You’ve eliminated Heaven and Hell from the Four Last Things.
    As absolutes. But Hell can be very real—take some proud society lady who is unpleasant to her servants. She is all caught up in money and her jewels—we all know people like that. She’s willing to sell herself to the Devil, but even the Devil rejects her because, at bottom, she’s a silly ass. He doesn’t need her. So there she is, ready for judgment, and God’s judgment is: “You’ll be a scrubwoman in your next existence. And if you complain once, you’ll clean latrines—provided you still have any soul left.”
    Most conservatives believe that the poor man has as good a chance or better of getting to Heaven as the rich man because the temptations among the rich are so awful that they can easily go to Hell. And that’s what enables conservatives to function. They can put up with inequity for others in this life because they feel there’s a better existence waiting for those poor who are patient and good in horrible circumstances.
    Well, I believe there’s an element of truth in that, just as there’s an element of truth in the implicit liberal faith that every soul, every human, is terribly important and must be protected in this life. These are not only warring notions but may be warring notions within God. Because where is the artist who does not have such profound disputes within? The Creation may have come out of these warring notions in the Creator.
    It isn’t that God is only fighting the Devil. He’s also debating within Himself or Herself what the next proper course might be. I wish to suggest that it is in experiencing the play of this complexity that future theology could find its nourishment rather than in the churchly insistence that God’s final intentions are all in the Book. No, I do not see the laws of existence as etched in stone, with no deviation permitted. No absolute Heaven or absolute Hell. Such concepts are devilish ways to confuse ourselves thoroughly, because they don’t add up. In