The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman

we are told, descended into the world; but we don’t perhaps consider as often as we should what this word descent implies. Quite evidently we don’t believe that God is up there in the sky; it is a spiritual height from which he descends, and spiritual depth which receives him. When we say that a man is in the spiritual depths, we mean that he is rotten and sick with anguish for himself and for his life in the world. These are the spiritual depths; and it was to this that the Christ descended – otherwise the phrase has no meaning.”
    He said this briskly and decisively, like a barrister; Matthew settled back and listened carefully.
    “Once we see this clearly there can be no question of our complacent mouthings about there being no God ‘out there’ – about God being nowhere but in our hearts and affections for our fellow men, and so on; none at all. Why should we love each other, after all’? Is there anything noble in us? All humanity is darkness, darkness; the forms of your mind are the forms of darkness – that darkness which perceived not the light that shone in it; we are clogged with darkness and the forms of darkness, and their number is legion: pride; anger; lust; envy; greed; sloth; and avarice – the classical seven, and a host of others: indifference; fear; ambition; vanity; passion for smallness, for small things, a love for the mean, the petty, the perverse, the temporary, the trivial; the craving for popularity, the urge to be pleasant and the urge to be treated pleasantly, yes, dark ness; nostalgia, sadness, melancholy; and hope, expectation, joy, pleasure and even kindness, curiosity, frankness, timidity; the refusal to bear burdens and the refusal to share burdens, because there are some men in whom the flames of pride burn so highly that they will not give any hint of suffering, and it is a form of darkness thus to cling jealously to one’s own afflictions as surely as it is a form of darkness to spread the germs of plague throughout the world by a hasty, panic impulse to run to one’s fellows, cry, weep, embrace strangers, kiss men and women indiscriminately out of fearful lust and the fear of imminent death; and because darkness, darkness, darkness is everywhere it is dark ness to discourse of these things, doubtless, it is folly, ignorance, and sin to make them known, folly, ignorance, and sin to know of them in secret and say nothing, folly, ignorance, and sin not to know of them at all…”
    His voice had become louder; he was speaking almost wildly now, and his voice filled the church and seemed to echo back and forth like a peal of bells. Matthew was overawed. The priest was rocking gently from side to side, his eyes half-closed, the tight intense frown still gripping his brow, his hands spread wide on the pulpit rail.
    “They are all – desires. They are all – a greed for the world; and we lust for the world because it is beautiful, oh, it is sodden with beauty like a sponge with vinegar; there is no truth in it, and there is no health in us. Consider what it is in the world that we love.”
    He paused again and swallowed, and passed his hand over his eyes, and then leant forward and began to speak again, softly at first and then working up to a climax.
    “The sky, first of all; the blue sky, the sun in it and the moon and the stars; the clouds, white, grey, and black; the rain, snow, hail, sleet, thunder, lightning, the rainbows and the haloes around the sun and the moon in strange weather; the mountains and the hills, criss-crossed by valleys and streams and glaciers, overhung with snow or mist or blossoming with spring flowers and green grass; the song of the birds, the lark and the nightingale and the blackbird and the thrush, and the screech of the owl by night; the midnight flitting of the bat, the flight of eagles into the sun, the slow flapping of the crow and the quick dart of sparrows; and the trees, the clear brightness of the larch and the venerable grey of the oak,