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# Notes on God
- URL: https://www.jamesreeves.co/torched-bliss/
- Published: 2025-02-19T17:48:33.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-15T03:48:17.000Z
- Description: Hell can be described in a thousand ways, but heaven remains impossible to grasp.
- Author: James A. Reeves
- Tags: Notebook

But why does talking about God feel so tacky? Strange how the grammar of damage is so vivid and precise, endlessly inventive—*torched, shanked, concussed*—while the vocabulary of peace remains squelchy and limp, reduced to cloudy words like *serenity* and *bliss*. I do not know how to speak about faith without feeling embarrassed, annoyed at the saccharine pitch in my voice. Language fails. Hell can be described a thousand ways, but heaven remains impossible to grasp.

Whenever I think about taking a leap of faith, a fork in the road appears: I’ll either become a wild-eyed zealot who wears a sandwich board, or I’ll have the self-satisfied smile of the public radio listener who speaks of energies and crystals. Agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, and even cosmic horror are more appealing than these options. So I turn away from the path and retreat into the familiar, even easy, life of doubt.

Yet the craving to become spiritualized persists.