James Baldwin quotes about faith & the church

Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell.

Folks ain’t got no time for the Lord, one day He ain’t going to have no time for them.

Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.

Me and the Lord, he had often said, don’t always get along so well. He running the world like He thinks I ain’t got good sense.

For the moment of salvation is a blinding light, cracking down into the heart from Heaven—Heaven so high, and the sinner so low.

For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.

Even a Reverend’s got the right to take off his clothes sometimes and act like a natural man.

I was down in the valley, I was by myself down there. I won’t never forget. May God forget me if I forget.

I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.

Listen. God is talking.

When we cease to tremble before Him we have turned out of the way.

Broadway: the way that led to death was broad, and many could be found thereon; but narrow was the way that led to life eternal, and few there were who found it.

She had fallen from that high estate which God had intended for men and women, and she made her fall glorious because it was so complete.

The Lord was riding on the wind to-night. What might that wind have spoken before the morning came?

These, God’s ministers, had indeed grown fat, and their dress was rich and various. They had been in the field so long that they did not tremble before God any more.

And something moved in John’s body which was not John. He was invaded, set at naught, possessed.

The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world.

When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden and dreadful terror: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

Now, we knew that nobody loved us: or, now, we knew who did. Whoever loved us was not here.

He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm.

It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door.