To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the static nature of traditional beliefs that can overshadow the dynamic essence of spiritual truth.
Thomas Merton uses a vivid metaphor to express how institutionalized religion can become stagnant, akin to barnacles on a ship, which obscures the vibrant, revolutionary truths at the heart of Christianity. He suggests that those who only witness this rigidity without experiencing the transformative power of faith may dismiss the notion of spiritual dynamism as nonsensical, highlighting a disconnect between static traditions and personal spiritual experiences.
In practice
During a sermon on renewal within the church.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
You know, if you're an American and you're born at this time in history especially, you're lucky. We all are. We won the world history Powerball lottery...
We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Of this blest man, let his just praise be given,_x000D_ _x000D_ Heaven was in him, before he was in Heaven.
The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.
We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
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