Out to get us?
My contemporaries (God bless them!) fear God, but in their own, contemporary way. They are not, for instance, Christian. But they do know, instinctively as it were, that God is all-powerful, and also that He is all-good. (Note that I have set aside all-beautiful, for the moment.)
They know this, and it is what they secretly fear, to the point where they will always deny it. For they think that God is out to get them, and they don’t want to give themselves away. He must be; for my contemporaries are not powerful, at all, and they also sense this.
My Islamic contemporaries feel themselves under special protection, perhaps, regardless how they behave; but when they begin to sense that they are not, they defect to Christianity. (And they make better Christians than the moderns who fear God in their own “unique,” individualist way.)
“My dear!” as the sage of Mrs Colaço’s Guest House (in Janpath Lane) used to say. “It is all very simple. God is not out to get you. Even if you deserve to be gotten!”
At least, He is not out to get you in the grimly scary way.
It is a delicate thing to understand how God is to be feared, if you have it wrong. He is to be feared with very sincere awe and wonder. He is not to be feared lightly. But He isn’t to be feared because He is out to get you. Truly, God has better things to do. Such as love, which fills the Creation. But this is not a light, sentimental sort of love. It is the real thing, as they say.
Note that “beauty” may invite us to approach. “Truth” may also be an invitation, but it is harder to see when you are looking for it, too urgently and expressly. First, as Négovan Rajic (of Trois-Rivières) used to say, you must consent to become a Useless Man. And then, beauty will be “just there” — when you were looking, perhaps, for something else.