For several years more I maintained public relations with the Almighty. But privately, I ceased to associate with Him. Only once did I have the feeling that He existed. I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands. I whirled about in the bathroom, horribly visible, a live target. Indignation saved me. I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed, I muttered like my grandfather: "God damn it, God damn it, God damn it." He never looked at me againJ This incident, which Sartre describes in his autobiography The Words, concludes his superficial religious education. Sartre continues: I have just related the story of a missed vocation: I needed God, He was given to me, I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him. Failing to take root in my heart, he vegetated in me for a while, then He died. Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the easy amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: "Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us. z I disagree. In this last citation Sartre is not describing the entire breadth of his relations with God. Probably he partially felt such a relationship to the Almighty, but in his philosophical writings, in his biographies, and in his plays, Sartre is definitely concerned with man's relationship to God and to the realm of the holy. God is not only an old belle, but is often discussed and related to in these writings. He calls one of his plays The Devil and the Good Lord and one biography Saint Genet. There is at least a tension between Sartre the person, for whom God is an old belle, and Sartre's writings. This tension is an indication of a more complex relation with God and with the realm of the holy. I have chosen to call this relation: a struggle against the holy.