Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her father and mother. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak. Her father had always said, God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is always with us. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Virago Press, 2009), p115
Home and Gilead, such lucid writing and such loving, careful attention to the characters. The beauty is in their flaws and failures, and the graces hidden and revealed.
