Faith & Spirit Quote by Marilyn French

There is a special bite in the way French opens with a prayer and immediately undercuts it: not with reverence, but with irritation at her own forgetfulness. "Oh, God" reads less like faith than like a culturally inherited reflex, the kind of exasperated invocation you use when life is getting too neatly managed and you can feel yourself shrinking inside it. The real target isn’t divinity; it’s the speaker’s impulse toward control.

"A little chaos" is carefully measured. French isn’t romanticizing collapse or self-destruction; she’s arguing for disruption in doses, the kind that shakes loose stale routines and dutiful self-policing. The line carries an especially feminist subtext given French’s era and work: women were taught to be the managers of order, the emotional custodians, the ones who keep the household, the calendar, the relationships, and often their own ambitions, "reasonable". Chaos becomes a small, illicit pleasure and a reclaimed right to be uncontained.

The question form does the heavy lifting. It frames chaos not as a philosophy but as a lapse in memory, suggesting the speaker has learned this lesson before and keeps being dragged back into the fantasy that stability equals virtue. "Good for the soul" takes a phrase typically used to justify wholesome discipline and flips it to validate messiness, spontaneity, risk. It’s a compact rebuke to the productivity ethos before we had a name for it, and it lands because it sounds like the private thought you have right before you blow up your schedule on purpose.