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.
Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.
The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.
The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest.
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.