I’ve finished Forster’s A Passage To India, which is a wonderful book. Reading it is akin to eating watermelon with a spoon. It just gets redder and jucier as you go along. The quote is taken from a scene near the end and struck me as a lovely image of intercessory prayer, in addition to being one of the most purely redemptive and hopeful moments in the book. The character, the Indian Hindu Professor Godbole (I daresay not a coinicidental name), is contemplating on a moment in a ceremony when he remembered an old woman from his past:

“It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, ‘Come, come, come, come.’ This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each according to his own capacities, and he knew that his were small. ‘One old Englishwoman and one little, little, wasp,’ he thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. ‘It does not seem much, still it is more than I am myself.’“