A noticeably vengeful guy
I just finished the book The Arsonist by Sue Miller. I reviewed it briefly here. There's a passage in the book about the main character's (Frankie's) motivation for doing aid work in Africa. Her romantic interest, Bud, asks her about her religious background and Frankie says:
Wow. Vengeful. Small. Unattractive. I've heard the whole thing about hypocrisy many times. But I can't remember hearing this description of God. I kind of don't know what to think, how I'd respond if someone said that to me.
What do you think?
Protestant. My mother's religion. Actually my grandparents' religion. My grandfather was a preacher. Presbyterian. And we used to to go church regularly,...So I was a churchgoer. But not ever a believer, even in my memory...
...I think they would have had me believe. We did the whole thing early on. Sunday school. Confirmation class...But I was a gimlet-eyed kid. I saw hypocrisy everywhere around me among the grown-ups, who were always on about honesty and kindness, not hitting, et cetera, and yet were so much not up to the job themselves...And then there was God--such an unattractive character! Why be so jealous, so small with the whole universe your own? And why call on us to be so good--so giving, so forgiving, so open and sweet, when you hardly model that for us.
(Bud) Yeah, a noticeably vengeful guy.
Exactly. (p. 132)
What do you think?