--Creed
"It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ."
--Dorothy Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?" The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1978) 34-35.
--Baptism
I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the Eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.
Very often when I leave a place of worship, the first impression I have of the so-called “outside world” is how small it is—how puny its politics, paltry its appetites, squint-eyed its interests. I have just spent an hour or so with friends reorienting myself in the realities of the world—the huge sweep of salvation and the minute particularities of holiness—and I blink my eyes in disbelief that so many are willing to live in such reduced and cramped conditions. But after a few hours or days, I find myself getting used to it and going along with its assumptions, since most of the politicians and journalists, artists and entertainers, stockbrokers and shoppers seem to assume that it’s the real world.
And then
some pastor or priest
calls me back to reality with “Let us worship God,”
and I get it straight again,
see it whole.
—Eugene H. Peterson, Take & Read
(tomorrow gonna be great day)
