“Open with that scene in the hospital, those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister. The humility of those people, their faith glowing like light around them, put me in such longing … to share their trustfulness. But then I asked myself: Must faith be blind? Why must it come out of people’s need to believe?

We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity or any other claim of God’s authority for that matter. Look around. God’s authority reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly submission.

So where is the truth to be found? Ecumenism is politically correct, but what is the case? If faith is valid in all its forms, are we merely making an aesthetic choice when we choose Jesus? And if you say, No, of course not, then we must ask, Who are the elect blessedly walking the true path to salvation … and who are the misguided others? Can we tell? Do we know? We think we know–of course we think we know. But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God. But, my friends, I ask you: Is God a Story? Can we, each of us examining our faith–I mean its pure center, not its consolations, not its habits, not its ritual sacraments–can we believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him? To presume to contain God in this Christian story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive … in our story of Him? Of Her? OF WHOM? What in the name of Christ do we think we are talking about!”

- taken from E.L. Doctorow’s novel City of God p. 14