Faith & Spirit Quote by Gene Wolfe

Wolfe slides a blade between two temptations religion can’t quit: spiritual hierarchy and spiritual branding. “I don’t think anyone is more intrinsically holy” rejects the idea that sanctity is a permanent trait you can inherit, display, or certify. Holiness, in this framing, is less a status than a situation - contingent, relational, often invisible to the people keeping score. It’s a quiet rebuke to clerical elitism, but also to the modern marketplace of enlightenment where “more evolved” is just “more expensive.”

Then he pivots to a disarming, almost domestic image of God: not the distant monarch, but the communicator. “People experience God in many ways” doesn’t flatter relativism so much as it punctures the fantasy of a single authorized channel. Wolfe’s subtext is pastoral and strategic: if grace is real, it will be adaptive. The daring move is the analogy: “God does what the rest of us do.” He drags the divine out of abstract perfection and into the messy pragmatics of being understood. That’s not trivializing; it’s incarnational. A God who “chooses the means” implies a God who concedes human limits, who translates.

Context matters: Wolfe’s fiction is thick with unreliable narrators, layered revelations, and religious imagery that refuses to sit still. This line reads like a novelist’s theology - suspicious of clear winners, confident that truth can arrive disguised, and convinced that the medium isn’t just packaging. It’s part of the message.