Above all, remember that God looks for solid virtues in us, such as patience, humility, obedience, abnegation of your own will - that is, the good will to serve Him and our neighbor in Him. His providence allows us other devotions only insofar as He sees that they are useful to us.

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things ? once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Yeah, well," I say, "I left Abnegation because I wasn't selfless enough, no matter how hard I tried to be.