An Invitation to Love by William A. Barry

Author:William A. Barry [Barry, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012120, RELIGION / Christian Life/Spiritual Growth, REL012080, RELIGION / Christian Life/Prayer
ISBN: 9780829446678
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 2018-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

The last lines may be the most quoted of Confessions. Those of us who acknowledge our desire for God and want to love and praise God are in good company: the whole of the human race. In various autobiographies and novels, I have found instances of the sudden eruption of a feeling of great well-being, accompanied by a desire to express thanks or praise. Sometimes the one who experiences this eruption is an unbeliever and doesn’t know whom to praise or thank. The mystery novelist P. D. James, herself a believer, must know of this experience. In at least two of her novels, she describes such experiences in characters who do not have religious faith. For example, in Original Sin, one of her detective stories featuring Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, James writes of his Scotland Yard subordinate Kate Mishkin:

Standing now between the glitter of the water and the high, delicate blue of the sky, she felt an extraordinary impulse which had visited her before and which she thought must be as close as she could ever get to a religious experience. She was possessed by a need, almost physical in its intensity, to pray, to praise, to say thank you, without knowing to whom, to shout with a joy that was deeper than the joy she felt in her own physical well-being and achievements or even in the beauty of the physical world. (148)

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