But it went much further than that. Somehow, and my memory would not tell me how this happened, God became doing right. And doing right was simply a matter of not doing wrong. It was right not to steal, right not to lie. God was an ethic and a negative. It was not, “God is love,” but “God is not wrong.” It might amount in action to the same thing. If one loved, then one would hardly do wrong, for wrong equalled a hurt to someone. But I learned only not to do wrong; I did not learn, or I never saw, the other half of the equation.

When I grew up, I discarded God without thought. God could not exist, for if He did, where was He, and what could He be thinking of? Surely if He were paying attention, I would feel His intensity, (for surely a God’s attention would be intense), and I felt nothing.

There was a God in the back of my mind, but He was stunted and retarded; He had gone no further than my childhood and my childhood conception, and He would not meet me where I was now. He did not help, and He did not exist.

Love? Surely one must believe in love. There were so many songs that said so. People had turned from God to love, and it was a rule that one must love.

And I would weep, because now I did not know what love was. I could not recognize it. Tenderness, passion, protectiveness — all those I had had and had felt. But love? What was that, and how could I believe in it if I did not know what it was? Perhaps the tenderness and passion and protectiveness were love — I had called them that, but how could I know?

I considered a belief in detachment, for that was most surely what I had. But that was believing in absence; something that had neither positive nor negative aspects, a zero, could surely not be believed in.

I wanted faith. Faith was not a job or going back to school or living with a man or holding children. Faith was — what? I needed it.

It did not occur to me to believe in what I did, to believe in a moment, and finally to lose belief and have just the moment. It did not occur to me that each one was eternity, that I was infinity, that beside my life everything else was pale, and that my life was pale beside everything else. It never occurred to me that it was all the same.