Sarah Perry: ‘For much of my life, I loved God. The echo of that never fades’ | Sarah Perry | The Guardian

It suited her few friends to imagine she’d been subject to a thousand physical and spiritual abuses, and been thrown out of chapel doors that then were bolted against her. It was difficult to explain that her father and her aunt received her absence with sorrow tempered by their trust in the will of God. She would return to Bethesda, or she wouldn’

Honestly, I see very little difference between Church and a Beyoncé concert. Maybe that’s the core of my theology: if it makes you feel something ineffable, if it’s bigger than you and yet deeply personal, if it sometimes involves a fog machine, it’s Church. Jesus is in there somewhere, swaying to the music, saving you a dance. What a pal.

And these days I seek out my faith in other doctrines’ – he gestured at a spectrograph nearby, and a four-inch reflecting telescope fitted with filters to aid in observations of the sun. ‘I supplement God with physics, and understand each as well as the other. Which is to say: not in the least! But I find it magnificent, knowledge piled on knowledg

What I found was that it was the prayers and practices of the church that allowed me to hold to—or rather to be held by—God when little else seemed sturdy, to hold to the Christian story even when I found no satisfying answers.

Occasionally it struck him that his love for the stars was no less a matter of faith than his remaining love for God; so his two faiths weren’t opposed, but took up equal residence.