Cliché vocabulary vs. piety: Conversations with campers about modern Christian/evangelical social norms and expectations have kept my mind busy for the last few weeks. Ive found it helpful to refer to the picture of the life of the saint painted by by Thomas Merton--Ive posted this before but it bears repeating: A saint is capable of loving created things and enjoying the use of them and dealing with them in a perfectly simple, natural manner, making no formal references to God, drawing no attention to his own piety, and acting without any artificial rigidity at all. His gentleness and his sweetness are not pressed through his pores by the crushing restraint of a spiritual straight-jacket. They come from his direct docility to the light of truth and to the will of God. Hence a saint is capable of talking about the world without any explicit reference to God, in such a way that his statement gives greater glory to God and arouses a greater love of God than the observations of someone less holy, who has to strain himself to make an arbitrary connection between creatures and God through the medium of hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion. -Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 14:12:35 +0000
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