"We always keep God waiting while we admit more importunate suitors"
About this Quote
God is cast here not as thunderous judge but as the patient caller left on hold, and that inversion is the engine of Malcolm de Chazal's line. "We always keep God waiting" lands like a quiet accusation because it assumes divine availability is constant, even indulgent. The sting comes from what follows: we are not simply distracted; we are choosing, actively, to "admit" others first.
The phrase "more importunate suitors" does double duty. "Suitors" turns everyday craving into courtship: attention becomes intimacy, and priority becomes fidelity. "Importunate" sharpens it further - these are not noble loves but pushy claimants, the sorts of demands that feel urgent because they are loud. De Chazal suggests a psychology of spiritual triage: we respond to the insistent, the immediate, the socially rewarded. The sacred, by contrast, doesn't shout. It waits, and that very patience makes it easy to postpone.
As a mid-20th-century writer from Mauritius with a mystic streak and an eye for moral irony, de Chazal often wrote in aphorisms that compress theology into social observation. The context isn't church doctrine so much as modern tempo: commerce, ego, romance, status, anxiety - the small gods that knock. The line's intent is less to shame belief than to expose a habit of attention. If God is delayed, it's not because the door is locked; it's because we keep answering the wrong knocks, mistaking urgency for importance.
The phrase "more importunate suitors" does double duty. "Suitors" turns everyday craving into courtship: attention becomes intimacy, and priority becomes fidelity. "Importunate" sharpens it further - these are not noble loves but pushy claimants, the sorts of demands that feel urgent because they are loud. De Chazal suggests a psychology of spiritual triage: we respond to the insistent, the immediate, the socially rewarded. The sacred, by contrast, doesn't shout. It waits, and that very patience makes it easy to postpone.
As a mid-20th-century writer from Mauritius with a mystic streak and an eye for moral irony, de Chazal often wrote in aphorisms that compress theology into social observation. The context isn't church doctrine so much as modern tempo: commerce, ego, romance, status, anxiety - the small gods that knock. The line's intent is less to shame belief than to expose a habit of attention. If God is delayed, it's not because the door is locked; it's because we keep answering the wrong knocks, mistaking urgency for importance.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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