Parenting & Family Quote by Richard Holloway

The seduction here is gentleness masquerading as command. Holloway doesn’t give you a thunderclap deity tallying sins; he offers a God who is "waiting eagerly" like an attentive parent, poised to reward the smallest effort. That phrasing does cultural work: it softens religion’s reputation for moral extremism by reframing holiness as incremental habit. Self-control isn’t presented as heroic asceticism but as "little" acts, "small" disciplines, even "feeble" searching. The humility is strategic. By lowering the bar, Holloway makes devotion feel accessible to the spiritually exhausted, the lapsed, the people who want faith without the performance.

The subtext is behavioral psychology baptized into grace. Practice precedes feeling: pray first, want later. He’s nudging readers away from the modern assumption that sincerity must arrive before commitment, and toward an older, almost monastic logic that desire can be trained. "Hunger and thirst" borrows the muscular rhetoric of the Beatitudes, but in Holloway’s hands it becomes less about moral righteousness and more about receptivity. Wanting is the gateway; emptiness is an asset.

There’s also a quiet transaction embedded in the warmth. God responds "with new strength" if you bring effort, however small. The conditional is cushioned by tenderness, but it’s still conditional: "shall be filled if they will only..". That "only" is doing a lot of pressure work, implying the blockage isn’t God’s absence but our distracted appetite. In a secular age crowded with substitutes for meaning, Holloway’s pitch is simple: discipline is how you re-learn to want the right thing.