"No, you subject the tradition to your irreverence to get back to where it began, only that, back down to the ground of simple ... unmediated awe. It is there, which is necessarily the state of reverence, the sharp perception of God's presence in the fact of our consciousness ... and therefore everywhere and in everyone and everything - it is that constancy of awe we hope for, a pre-Scriptural state as alive to us as the contemporary moment, and which, of course, comes with absolutely no guarantees. That is where we begin ..."  E.L. Doctorow, City of God.