That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that gospel can evoke complex feelings of self-love and self-hatred simultaneously.
Dorothy Allison's quote reflects the dual nature of gospel and its profound impact on self-perception. It highlights how the teachings and messages within gospel can inspire individuals to feel both admirable and ashamed; they can bring out a deep love for oneself while simultaneously invoking feelings of inadequacy or guilt. This complexity underscores the intense emotional experience that accompanies spiritual exploration and understanding.
In practice
During a sermon, a speaker might use this quote to illustrate the complexities of faith and self-acceptance.
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
I find it most intriguing to contemplate the fact that while men are considering what place to give Jesus Christ in history, He has already decided what place to give them in eternity.
Did he understand, as those interminable minutes ticked by, that being alone is not the same as being lonely? That being alone is a neutral state⦠something that exists only in the mind, not in the world, and, like a virus, is unable to survive without a willing host?
Peter Keating: "Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you. Everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable-and unimportant?" | Howard Roark: "No."
Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
If princes and kings could follow it (Tao), all things would by themselves abide, Heaven and Earth would unite and sweet dew would fall. People would by themselves find harmony, without being commanded.
If the many and the One be indeed the same Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of realization. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to avoid.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.