Oh, come on, thinks the believing reader. No need to reinvent the wheel. You would save yourself so much time if you knew how everything was supposed to join up. Quick, someone air-freight this woman a Jesuit! But this is to let ourselves off the hook too easily, two ways round. If someone as open as this, with such a strong working sense of the tragic possibilities of existence, recognises nothing in the descriptions of faith she has encountered, then we are not describing it rightly. If the ‘rage of joy’ she has felt seems to have nothing to do with goodness, then we have been misrepresenting virtue. If what we have managed to extend in her direction seems to be only an offer of authoritarian parenthood, or a resistible politics, then we have made a mistake of our own about the place we allow for the wildness of God.
Francis Spufford, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God (I read this in his essay collection, True Stories). He’s probably a little too hard on his fellow Christians here, as I don’t think good descriptions are too difficult to find, if a person wants to find them – but the larger point that there are so many bad (tamed, made in our image) descriptions of God, trumpeted so loudly, is a good one.