Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, May 19, 1929

I feel the need of getting away to some secret place to think about God;
If there is a God —
Is the fact that I feel the loss of a personal God due to certain [the rest of this sentence was erased and replaced in older handwriting] vicious thoughts that always haunt me? Does one have to be pure first before he can feel the presence of a God? Why cannot an impure man sense a Divine Being, even one who might frown on him?
I wish with all my being sometimes that there were a powerful Being who would reach a helping hand out to me — one to whom I could come weeping as I did to my mother when I was a boy, confess all my baseness, and be forgiven.
Perhaps the trouble is in losing that fine healthy boyish belief in goodness & purity — I see myself as a boy wandering out thru the fields and woods worshipping God in nature, filled with the ecstasy of God’s creations, conscious that a great divine Being had created all these marvels for the delectation of man. Then there was a sacredness to a sun-topped cloud seen in my June Saturday rambles; to the first soft downy hepaticas that pushed up thru the dry leaves; to the glint of cold light on the windblown hayfields of late June —
O God – how to get back there! Can one, having destroyed one image, never create another?
--Charles E. Burchfield, May 19, 1929