Sinner (Priest, #2)

by Sierra Simone

I know how to make sin feel like heaven.

But right now can be as long as we want to make it, right? Maybe it’s the next ten minutes; maybe it’s the next twenty. However long it is, I don’t want to rush it.

“There’s no agenda for life; there’s no itinerary; there’s no strategic plan,” Tyler continues. “Everything can go perfectly…until it doesn’t, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.

The most selfless people, the most driven people, they need permission to take care of themselves; they need someone who will put them first because they won’t do it for themselves.

It’s agony. I’m dying. And as I’m both alight and aflame with loving her, these splashes of thought keep coming out of nowhere, like raindrops on a sunny day.

“Biblical metaphors for God include a laboring woman, a breastfeeding mother, even a mother hen. And man and woman were both created in God’s image, were they not? Why use Him and not Her? In fact, why even say God instead of Goddess? Both Him and Her are not enough to contain the fullness of God, who is outside the construct of gender, who is so much more than the human mind can conceive.”

faith and belief are the practices of committing a life in the face of no answers. God is and always will be outside of human comprehension. And loving Her is an act; it’s not stubbornly repeating creeds and trying to force Her into modern expectations or rational paradigms. She’ll never fit in the same boxes we apply to science and reason; She’s not meant to. And to try to force it only breeds spiritual violence in the end.”

Death, even surrounded by family, even with prayer and morphine working in tandem, is hard. There’re no do-overs; there’re no rehearsals.

I hope Mom is dancing between the raindrops now. I hope she’s somewhere laughing and dancing with God.