James Baldwin quotes about faith & the church

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me.

Perhaps she had lost her love because she had not, in the end, believed in it enough.

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It has been so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

And God did not hear the prayers of the fearful, for the hearts of the fearful held no belief. Such prayers could rise no higher that the lips that uttered them.

The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer.

God’s got your number, knows where you live, death’s got a warrant out for you.

And he feared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that until he made the vow he would never find the strength.

It was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned.

I done made up my mind to live all I can while I can. If that’s a sin, well, I’ll go on down to Hell and pay for it. But don’t you fret, Reverend—it ain’t your soul.

I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but I know you going to be brought low one of these days. I ain’t holy like you are, but I know right from wrong.

But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him.

I been thinking how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.

I remember, he was later to say, the day my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt’s mind.

For his drifting soul was anchored in the love of God; in the rock that endured for ever. The light and the darkness had kissed each other, and were married now, for ever, in the life and the vision of John’s soul.

I’m ready. I’m coming. I’m on my way.

Satan gets his foot in the door, he ain’t going to rest till he’s in the room. You is in the Word or you ain’t—ain’t no half-way with God.

Ain’t nothing but the love of God can make the darkness light.

His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.

Yet, in Florence’s heart to-night hatred and bitterness weighed like granite, pride refused to abdicate from the throne it had held so long. Neither love nor humility had led her to the altar, but only fear.

I looked at my hands and my hands were new. I looked at my feet and my feet were new. And I opened my mouth to the Lord that day and Hell won’t make me change my mind.

This was the story of innumerable shepherds who failed, in their arrogance, to feed the hungry sheep; of many a father and mother who gave their children not bread but a stone, who offered not the truth of God but the tinsel of this world.