Possibly my Favorite Quote`

This quote gives one of the best portrayals that I have read of God and how our relationship with him should be. I'm not sure that the author shares this view - as you read it you may detect a bit of cynicism or dismissiveness in the narration - but to me it makes it all the more interesting to think that someone who does not believe could see a truth that runs against normal misconceptions.

First some background: This is part of the story of King Arthur and his knights of the round table, as told by T. H. White in The Once and Future King. King Arthur is married to Queen Guenever. Sir Lancelot is Arthur's champion and good friend. He almost never loses a fighting match. Early on, Lancelot and Guenever fall in love and have a long-term affair. Lancelot goes on the quest to find the Holy Grail, encounters God in a few ways, and comes back insisting that he and Guenever be merely friends because he does not want to live in sin. This upsets Guenever, who when the strain comes to a head sends Lancelot away from Camelot.

A while after Lancelot leaves, there is a feast where somebody eats a poisoned apple intended for Galahad, of whom Queen Guenever is not fond. A knight named Sir Mador accuses her, and as is customary the matter is to be settled by a joust. Arthur is not allowed to fight for his wife and Lancelot is away, and the Queen has a hard time finding someone to back her cause. She does get a champion eventually, but right before the battle Lancelot returns and takes his place. Right after Lancelot's entrance, White launches into this description:

      He had not come back out of condescension to the Queen. The cruel explanation that he had "given her up" so as to save his soul, and that he had now returned from a sense of dramatic magnanimity, was not the true one. It was more complicated.
      This knight's trouble from his childhood — which he never completely grew out of — was that for him God was a real person. He was not an abstraction who punished you if you were wicked or rewarded you if you were good, but a real person like Guenever, or like Arthur, or like anybody else. Of course he felt that God was better than Guenever or Arthur, but the point was that he was personal. Lancelot had a definite idea of what he looked like, and how he felt — and he was somehow in love with this Person.
      The Ill-Made Knight was not involved in an Eternal Triangle. It was an Eternal Quadrangle, which was eternal as well as quadrangular. He had not given up his mistress because he was afraid of being punished by some sort of Holy Bogy, but he had been confronted by two people whom he loved.
— T. H. White, The Once and Future King, The Ill-Made Knight, ch. XXXVII