Quote on God, religion, church and the Bible

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away, Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting, and by and large, fun. Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point in going over and over the same ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:
“Do you believe in God?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what God is?”
“Yes.”
“What is God then?”
“He’s God!”
“Do you go to church?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know it all!”
“What do you know?”
“I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees” — and the catalog went on —“with all of me.”
Carol grinned at me, Stan made a face, and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bit of coughing. There’s nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that’s what it amounted to. (Out of the mouths of babes . . .”) Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: “And God said love me, love them and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.”
The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As to going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn’t everywhere, he wasn’t anywhere. For her, churchgoing and “Mister God” talks had no necessary connection. You went to church to get the message when you were little. Once you had got it, you were out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn’t got the message or didn’t understand or it was “just for swank.”

~ Fynn