Where Are You 'Under the Sun'?

I'm posting a little puzzle here. I want you to read the following, and then I'll share some of the details that prompted my quoting it. Hopefully, it will be as much of a jaw-dropper to you as it was to me.

Prayer is attractive enough when it is considered in a context of...sunny, joyous country churches. And as a matter of fact, the Church means all this. It is a class religion, the cult of a special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation. That is the principal basis for its rather strong coherence up to now. There is certainly not much doctrinal unity, much less a mystical bond between people many of whom have even ceased to believe in the Sacraments. The thing that holds them together is the powerful attraction of their social traditions, and the stubborn tenacity with which they cling to certain social standards and customs, more or less for their own sake. The Church depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservatism of the ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and these cling to their Church the way they cling to...a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the countryside, baseball, apple-pie, 4th of July parades and fireworks...and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexplicable ache in the national heart.
I got mixed up in all this...and it was strong enough in me to blur and naturalize all that might have been supernatural in my attraction to pray and to love God. And consequently the grace that was given me was stifled, not at once, but gradually. As long as I lived in this peaceful hothouse atmosphere...I was pious, perhaps sincerely. But as soon as the frail walls of this illusion broke down again--...and I saw that underneath their sentimentality, these were just as brutal as the others--I made no further effort to keep up what seemed to me to be a more or less manifest pretense...
...It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world...

First, I should admit to modifying the foregoing quote in one part--the imagery series that spoke of apple pies and holiday parades. The original would have given away the fact that it was not written about our time or our people, even though I say it IS written for our time and for our people. No, the original spoke of castles and games of cricket and pipe-smoking. The Church mentioned was the Church of England and the text referred to the state of affairs as the author saw it in the 1920's--reaching back nearly 100 years ago. These are the reflections of Thomas Merton, a protestant turned Trappist monk, in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. I don't know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the very church from which our forefathers sought religious freedom, braving much hardship for that cause--this is the very church we today take for a model in so many ways, if Merton's observations be at all accurate.

Before we can even begin to hope to make beneficial choices about our faith-walk we must first throw off the lie that we are facing pertinent issues...the issues are not the issue. The issues change like a suit of clothing, but the body that gives them shape while being worn, that body must be recognized as ever the same old body. And the health of that body can not be changed by donning an ever more trendy and glamorous costume. Health is best assessed by standing naked before a mirror under a strong light and making careful examination of what we see.

Favorite Quotes from C.S. Lewis

Looking for a specific quote by this favorite author/philosopher of mine led me to a page full of wonderful quotes from a book by Nathan Jensen--too many to make a simple status update on my facebook. So I can enjoy them again later:



"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are."

"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."

"The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence."

"And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies' plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger."

"To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

"Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us..."

"A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers--including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower."

"'We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge--the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.'"

"To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."

"Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control."

"The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite."

"Looking for God--or Heaven--by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters..."

"Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions."

"He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself..."

"Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves."