“Ian, have you fallen into the hands of some sect?” his father asked.
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “I have merely discovered a church that makes sense to me, the same as Dober Street Presbyterian makes sense to you and Mom.”
“Dober Street didn’t ask us to abandon our educations,” his mother told him. “Of course we have nothing against religion; we raised all you children to be Christians. But our church never asked us to abandon our entire way of life.”
“Well, maybe it should have,” Ian said.
—Ann Tyler, Saint Maybe
In general the churches, visited by me too often on weekdays – when the custodian was moving about the communion table like a packing case, and sweeping up the chewing gum wrappers that insolently spangled the sacrosanct reaches of the choir – bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it.
—John Updike, A Month of Sundays
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