In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

"Pascal, the skeptic, says that he would rather believe in God
and be wrong than not believe and then find out that God did exist
after all."
He leaned towards her. "Agape, you know this?"
"Agape, sure, I know Agape. It's Greek for love. The celestial
kind, I think. So you must think of her as um, like, beyond Time and
Space? I remember some my mom's books on stuff like the
Rosicrucians, Cathars and the Manichaeans. All these so-called heretics
set up alternative communities in remote mountains. You know, pure
living, community and practicing Agape. Like model hippie communes.
So, um, when was this painted?"
He turned back to the painting. "Late fourteen hundreds to
early fifteen hundreds, perhaps. The cult of Mary, that grew from the
area of Chartres, not far from here, absorbed the ancient beliefs of the
pre-Christian goddess in her various forms, but I dunno if the artist
knew about any of this. In the end it is unimportant, as the message
transcends all temporal manifestation. The artist was thought to be
Memling for centuries, but now this has been disputed, so she is
deemed almost worthless, but that makes her more mysterious this way,
no?”
"I didn't think this was copy," she said and walked up close. A
magic window through time, past the tiny cracks, around the filigree of
Gothic arches framing the virgin, over the folds of red velvet beneath
the little book in her hand, through the busy landscape to the hills that
disappeared in a blue mist that deepened towards the top to pure cobalt
Space. Everything there was still and perfect, unaffected by the turmoil
of history. She was there in a tiny two dimensional time capsule with a
message that "transcends all temporal manifestation."
"Nothing changes in there," she said.
"Nada te turbe, nada te espante, todo se pasa,
Dios no se muda,
La Paciencia todo lo acanca, quien a Dios tiene
Nada le falta. Sólo Dio basta."
"Spanish. Nothing can trouble you, nothing can scare you,
everything changes, God alone remains unchanged, patience brings
everything, he who holds God wants nothing. God alone suffices. Who
wrote that?"
"Saint Theresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic."
"Wow, that's very Zen, except for the god part. So, what's
happening in here?"
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