Economic Gifts, Controlling Possessions

"We take things and hoard things and give things to control our little worlds and the things wind up controlling us. They clutter our space; they crimp our hearts; they sour our souls. Benedict says that the answer is that we not allow ourselves to have anything beyond life's simple staples in the first place and that we not use things - not even the simplest things - to restrict the life of another by giving gifts that tie another person down. Benedictine simplicity, then, is not a deprivation. It frees us for all of life's surprises."

Joan Chittister OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 101

Three Types of Cupidity

"There are three reasons for the love of money: pleasure-seeking, vainglory, and lack of faith. And more serious than the other two is lack of faith. The hedonist loves money because with it he lives in luxury; the vain person because with it he can be praised; the person who lacks faith because he can hide it and keep it while in fear of hunger, or old age, or illness, or exile."

Maximus the Confessor, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 94-95

Trusting in Capital

"A brother asked an old man, 'Will you let me put two pieces of money aside in case I should be ill?' The old man replied, 'It is not good to keep more than is necessary for the body. If you keep these two pieces of money your hope will be placed in them, and if misfortune comes to you, God will no longer look after you.' Let us throw all our care on God, for he cares for us."

A Desert Father, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 91

Suburban Contemplative

"I don't think anyone can live contemplatively without discipline, and that includes your local monk or nun. So, if I am going to live as a contemplative in the suburbs, I am going to have to structure my life, just as a monk or nun must structure his of her life. In both cases, the structure, while it will be different in detail, must be such that it provides regular nourishment for the contemplative dimension of life. This includes regular lectio, or spiritual reading, to undergird it and to challenge the way I am living."

Joan Chittister OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 75

Disciplines as Works, Opposed to Faith

"Our basic problem with God is that we just do not trust him as we should. He who is infinite goodness deserves and requires our complete trust. We had rather have something a bit more concrete to hold on to, like that tough, self-imposed fast I just went through. 'Now that's something I know I did.' But I wonder whom you did it for?"

David Altman OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 71

Pseudocontemplatives

"Pseudocontemplatives ... see work as an obstacle to human development. They want to spend their hours lounging or drifting or gazing of 'processing.' They work only to sustain themselves and even then as little as possible. Pseudocontemplatives say that they are seeking God in mystery, but as a matter of fact they are actually missing the presence of God in the things that give meaning to life."

Joan Chittister OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 67

Security of Spiritual Direction

"We crave for spiritual security, or rather the feeling of security; real security is what God wants us to have and that can only be when we have let go our own securities, which are illusory, and rely on him alone. The craving for spiritual guidance may well form one of these illusory securities. We want to be assured that what is happening in our prayer is all right, we want to be given definite guidelines so that we can feel safe. 'Direction' .. can be dangerous. For one thing it presumes not only an intimate knowledge of the one concerned but also a knowledge of God and his mysterious ways on the part of the director."

Ruth Burrows OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 24

Self-denial Toward Self-transcendence

"Life in common always has its asceticism. Contemplative union with God both requires and causes self-denial. That very idea raises defenses in our culture; we do not want to hear the word. Monastic living witnesses not only to its necessity, but even more to its potential. Self-denial is better spelled self-transcendence, since its purpose is the going beyond that opens out to new and deeper life. What dies is exaggerated individualism; what flourishes, a love that strengthens one's ego and a love for others that enriches all in the family of God."

Marie Beha OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 15

Refining Fire of Dailiness

"There is, of course, an anchorite lurking in each of us who wants to get away from it all, who finds the task of dailiness devastating, who looks for God in clouds and candlelight ... [Benedict] himself set out to live the spiritual life as a hermit and then discovered, apparently, that living life alone is nowhere near as searing of our souls as living it with others. It is one thing to plan my own day well with all its balance and its quiet and its contemplative exercises. It is entirely another rank of holiness to let my children and my superiors and my elderly parents and the needs of the poor do it for me."

Joan Chittister OSB, from The Monastic Way edited by: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, p. 7

Fundamentalist-Modernist Heresies

"Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone's being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 163

Missionary Democracy

"We really do want to run the world, to set things right, to spread democracy and freedom everywhere. We really want to believe, and even Jesse Jackson wants to believe, that America is different from other nations - we want to believe we do not act our of self-interest, but out of ideals. There is a close connection between the work of Lyndon B. Johnson, our greatest civil rights president, and our descent into the depths of Vietnam. For Johnson, the two went together. Our grandest illusions about ourselves led to the greatest horrors of our history: We killed the native Americans, we bombed theNorth Vietnamese for the very best of American reasons. That does not mean that those who served were dishonorable, but it does say that they heroically did their duty for a dishonorable war. Honorable people can be used dishonorably. It happens all the time. Until our society knows how to admit that, it has no chance of being truthful."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 159

No Such Thing as Safe Love or Ethics

"No ethic is worthy that does not require potentially the suffering of those we love. Nothing cuts against liberal ethical sentimentality more than this. We wish that there were some means of holding convictions without requiring the suffering of our friends and families. We try to make 'love' an individual emotion that does not ask someone else to suffer because of our love. Of course, such thinking makes activities like marriage and childbearing incomprehensible since these practices inextricably involve those we love suffering as part and parcel of our joint endeavors."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 148

Materialism and the Idol of Security

"Our lies are the correlate of our materialism, for both our materialism and our self-deceit are our attempts to deal with our insecurity, our finitude by taking matters into our own hands. Luther called security the ultimate idol. And we have shown, time and again, our willingness to exchange anything - family, health, church, truth - for a taste of security."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 131

I'm the Solution To My Problems

"Our society tends to respond to the problem of lack of meaning and purpose by telling people that they will feel better if they more fully develop their egos. Look more deeply within for the solution rather than look outside yourself for help. In a godless society, where there really is not much outside ourselves but our own self-projections, this is probably the best advice one could expect."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 127

Sentiment as Sediment of Theism

"Sentimentality, after all, is but the way our unbelief is lived out. Sentimentality, that attitude of being always ready to understand but not to judge, corrupts us and the ministry. This is as true of conservative churches as it is of liberal. Sentimentality is the subjecting of the church year to 'Mother's Day' and 'Thanksgiving.' Sentimentality is the necessity of the church to side with the Sandinistas against the Contras. Sentimentality is 'the family that prays together stays together.' Without God, without the One whose death on the cross challenges all our 'good feelings,' who stands beyond and over against our human anxieties, all we have left is sentiment, the saccharine residue of theism in demise."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 120-121

Morality as Language

"Learning to be moral is much like learning to speak a language. You do not teach someone a language (at least nowhere except in language courses at a university!) by first teaching that person rules of grammar. .. No. You learn to speak by being initiated into a community of language, by observing your elders, by imitating them. The rules of grammar come later, if at all, as a way of enabling you to nourish and sustain the art of speaking well."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 97

The Church As Stumbling Block

"The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers.
Unfortunately, an accomodationist church, so intent on running errands for the world, is giving the world less and less in which to disbelieve. Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people's self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?"

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 94-95

An Idolatrous Peace

"Christians, we have been told recently, should work for peace. But what good is a peace movement that works for peace for the same idolatrous reasons we build bombs - namely, the anxious self-interested protection of our world as it is? Christians are free to work for peace in a nonviolent, hopeful way because we already know something about the end. We do not argue that the bomb is the worst thing humanity can do to itself. We have already done the worst thing we could do when we hung God's Son on the cross."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 89

Community Ethics

"It is important to recognize that all ethics, even non-Christian ethics, arise out of a tradition that depicts the way the world works, what is real, what is worth having, worth believing. Tradition is a function and a product of community. ... What we have failed to see is that even the Kantian ethic, based on the myth of the isolated, rational individual, arises out of a story, an account of the way the world works, and is backed up by a community. Individualistic, contextualist ethics is dependent on a 'community' that exists by devaluing community and a 'tradition' whose claim is that we become free by detaching ourselves from our tradition."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 79-80

Tyrannical Community

"When people are very detached, very devoid of purpose and a coherent world view, Christians must be very suspicious of talk about community. In a world like ours, people will be attracted to communities that promise them an easy way out of loneliness, togetherness based on common tastes, racial or ethnic traits, or mutual self-interest. There is then little check on community becoming as tyrannical as the individual ego. Community becomes totalitarian when its only purpose is to foster a sense of belonging in order to overcome the fragility of the lone individual."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 78

Church as Interest Group

"The way most of us have been conditioned to think about an issue like abortion is to wonder what laws, governmental coercion, and resources would be necessary to support a 'Christian' position on this issue. The first ethical work, from this point of view, is for Christians to devise a position on abortion and then to ask the government to support that position. Because we are fortunate enough to live in a democracy, we Christians can, like every other pressure group in this society, push for the legislative embodiment of our point of view. ... In acting as if the church's ethics were something that makes sense to every thinking, sensitive, caring American despite his or her faith or lack of it, the church is underestimating the peculiarity of Christian ethics."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 70-71

"Follow Me", not "Understand Me"

"We cannot know Jesus without following Jesus. ... Furthermore, we know Jesus before we know ourselves. For how can we know the truth of ourselves as sinful and misunderstanding, but redeemed and empowered without our first being shown, as it was shown to his first disciples?"

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 55

Enlightenment Adventure

"The liberal adventure was the creation of a world of freedom. By labeling certain principles as naturally 'self-evident,' by offering equality and rights, the Enlightenment hoped to produce people who were free. Detached from oppressive claims of tradition and community, holding the significance of their lives within themselves as an individual, natural right, being given the independence to fashion their own future, they were to become free."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 50

The Demonstrative Church

"The confessing church moves from the activist church's acceptance of the culture with a few qualifications, to rejection of the culture with a few exceptions. The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamatory action. This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most 'effective' thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 47

In But Not Of?

"The church need not worry about whether to be in the world. The church's only concern is how to be in the world, in what form, for what purpose."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 43

(Incidentally) Faith-based Politics

"The moment that life is formed on the presumption that we are not participants in God's continuing history of creation and redemption, we are acting on unbelief rather than faith. ... Most American Christians [assume] that the key to our political effectiveness lies in translating our political assertions into terms that can be embraced by any thinking, sensitive, modern (though disbelieving), average American."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 36-37

Radical, Illiberal Church

"That which makes the church 'radical' and forever 'new' is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church's view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend toward solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus. These 'solutions' are only mirror images of the status quo."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 28

In-credible Gospel

"The theologian's job is not to make the gospel credible to the modern world, but to make the world credible to the gospel."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 24

What to Believe

"The Bible's concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 22

Christianity as Problem

"Transform the gospel rather than ourselves. It is this Constantinian assumption that has transformed Christianity into the intellectual 'problem,' which so preoccupies modern theologians"

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 22

Translated Gospel

"By the very act of our modern theological attempts at translation, we have unconsciously distorted the gospel and transformed it into something it never claimed to be - ideas abstracted from Jesus, rather than Jesus with his people."



Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 21

The Self We Judge in Others

"Whatever we see in another's behaviour that tempts us to be judgmental is sprung from the same root, the same conflict with God as our own. This recognition is the source of true compassion which embodies the humility of Christ."

Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B. from "The Paradox of Prayer" in Singing God's Praises p. 338

Making Prayer OUR Work

"The danger to avoid is that of making prayer to be a conjuring act. If we call on the Holy Name of Jesus, Jesus will come of His own free will. But if we think our calling causes Jesus to come, all we get is fantasy."


"Here we find how deeply we want to do the work of prayer which only God can do. Here we discover how deeply we wish to play God. It may look innocent enough. It is our human experience that we want to please people by doing nice things for them. If we ever find that we can offer nothing to someone whom we love, we may be so humiliated that we turn against that person. If we gain the obscure glimmer of wanting to want God, then we want the self-respect that comes with doing something for Him."


Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B. from "The Paradox of Prayer" in Singing God's Praises p. 336,337

Paradox of Prayer

"The reason we cannot find a simple set of instructions on how to pray in the Bible is that God has graciously preserved us from a possible source of the illusion that prayer is something we do on our own."

"We are commanded to do what we cannot do. All the same, our own act of will in desiring this prayer of the Spirit as a gift is necessary since God gives His Gifts to those who want them. It may take time for each of us to agree with God that this gift is what he wants."

"We learn that we ought not simply to want the things we pray for, but want to want to agree with God's will. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that prayer is not about changing God's mind, but about putting ourselves into conformity with God's will. ... It is at this point that we really come to grips with the question: Do I want the gift of prayer?"

"Yes, we want to will God's will, but at the same time we will our own will. The former may even impress us as being the better but more distant, while our own passions are so near and perhaps will do well enough. Thus, we find within ourselves the flat contradiction of wanting God and not wanting God. There is no easy way out. To undo what God has done will take about as much strength of will as to persevere in this journey of prayer."

"If we find that we are helpless then we are further along than we think. ... Here is where the Spirit as a two-edged sword begins to cut into the heart of our human condition. Here in this wound, while our will seems to bleed, comes the miraculous beginning of the gift of prayer. We seem to have accomplished nothing. We may seem to be worse than we were before. But right where the wound bleeds, a breath of prayer flows through us."

Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B. from "The Paradox of Prayer" in Singing God's Praises p. 333-336

Imperfect Prayer

"[God] knows us for what we are, and it is just this gift and no other that he so longingly awaits. Our mental prayer might be nothing but this; a quiet waiting at His feet, adoring Him in wordless manner. There will be noise, distraction and, alas, sin; we gather all of it together and lift it up to God. There may be no pleasure, no spiritual delight. Good, just so is God loved."

Dom Patrick Dalton, O.S.B. from "Prayer" in Singing God's Praises p. 331

Obsession With One's State of Life

"We should never have scruples about whether the state in life we have chosen is the most perfect or what sort of progress we are making. These are merely signs of excessive self-regard."

Prior Aelred Glidden, O.S.B. from "Trust in God and Trust in Me" in Singing God's Praises p. 304

Orienting, Not Dictating Tradition

"The best way to tread the middle ground between fanaticism and indifference is to drink deeply of the tradition that matters to us. The more firmly we root ouselves in our tradition the better we can hear other points of view uttered in the name of that tradition, and the more clearly we can perceive the value of traditions other than our own. Tradition orients us, it does not dictate."

Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B. from "Community & Convictions" in Singing God's Praises p. 75

Strong, Detached Convictions

"Holding convictions with detachment allows for holding them strongly, but with an openness to possible correctives from other points of view. We have to consider whether or not our convictions have become idols, substitutes for God Himself. We may be tempted to think that we are saved from idolatry by having no convictions at all. But that does not work. In that case, we usually end up making an idol either of 'togetherness' at the expense of all other values or making an idol out of a desire to be left alone and affected by nobody."

Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B. from "Community & Convictions" in Singing God's Praises p. 72

Sanctification of Time

"The reason for the plurality of offices each day is found in another aim which such prayer has always had; the sanctification of time. Of course, time of itself is not and cannot be made to be either holy or wicked. What is meant is that by frequently resorting to prayer we center in once again on our life with God. They are periods of intensity of that life with Him which we seek to have at all times. ... Such an office holds one up, keeps one praying and turned to God. If I had to create my own prayers each time I pray, I would seldom pray. There are acknowledged dangers to such formal, written prayers. They are not to be rushed through as if the words alone, mindlessly rattled off, would magically constitute and adequate prayer offering. But we are human, and the very structure of official prayer holds us up, and invites us, and keeps us in vital touch with God.

Prior Anthony Damron, O.S.B. in "The Church's Prayer" from Singing God's Praises p. 43

Freedom to Not Be God

"There is a terrific risk in renouncing the desire to remake other people. We do not feel secure when we relinquish control of others and our situation. We are forced to live with the otherness of others. There is no choice but to give others space to find themselves in God, just as we assume this right for ourselves."

Br. Andrew Marr, O.S.B. in "Living a Mystery" from Singing God's Praises p. 32

Love Even Your Spouse

"I have always assumed that one of the hardest aspects of Christianity is the admonition for Christians to love one another even if they are married."

Stanley Hauerwas from Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

Against the Nice God of Progress

"If you already know what the goods are on grounds different from Christian practice, then I remain unclear why one should worry too much whether being Christian makes much difference one way or the other."

"I am wondering on what grounds [one] believes [one] can take a position for or against the tradition to decide to submit to it or not."

"By modernity, I mean that project to create social orders that would make it possible for each person to have no story except the story you choose when you had no story."

"As Paul Ramsey was fond of saying, "God intends to kill us all in the end." I assume that also means the human species. I see no reason to believe that God's salvation through Jesus' cross and resurrection was about insuring that all of this is going to come out all right in the end."

"Those Christians who thought they were following the "present working of Christ" through their acceptance of violence made a disastrous mistake. The reasons for that acceptance were various but certainly, for many, it represented the attempt to be on the progressive side of history."

"If all Jesus was about was helping us see that God is that "factor in the world that introduces freedom, novelty, spontaneity, life, creativity, responsibility, and love," I cannot see why anyone would think it worth their time to kill him."

"Now that I am back among the Methodists, I have discovered they do have a conviction: God is nice. Moreover, since we are a sanctificationist people, we have a correlative-we ought to be nice also. I must admit one of the things that bothers me about Cobb's God is that she is just too damned nice."

"I do not believe that the trinitarian Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an image, Rather, Trinity is a name. Christians do not believe we know something called God and then further identify God as Trinity. Rather, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is God."

"I seek to know how to go on when I do not know where I am. I assume that is not a new condition for Christians to be in because being a member of the church becomes necessary exactly because the claims of Jesus are meant to put us out of control. However, once we Christians get over the need to run the world, to pretend that we know not only where we are but where everyone else is or should be, maybe we will be able to live lives so joyful others may actually be attracted to the celebration we, call worship."

Stanley Hauerwas from Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

A Hell of Those Who Say "Hell is Others"

"The characteristic of lost souls is 'their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves.'"

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 109

quoted from: von Hugel, Essays and Addresses, 1st series, What do we mean by Heaven and Hell?

Willing Salvation of Those Who Will Not

"I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully 'All will be saved.' But my reason retorts 'Without their will, or with it?' If I say 'Without their will' I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say 'With their will,' my reason replies 'How if they will not give in?"

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 106

Willful Discipline

"Fasting asserts the will against the appetite - the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetites and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger of rebellion. But the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves, strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole man to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 100

Happy Virtue, Painful Surrender

"We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a man is the more he will like it; but we agree with Kant so far as to say that there is one right act - that of self-surrender - which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 90

The Goal of Revenge

"Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but its end is not wholly bad - it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger wants the guilty party not merely to suffer, but to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 84

Happy Humility

"Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, deperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his 'faith in human nature' who is really sad."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 60

Kindness Trumps the Virtues?

"If, then, you are tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane - if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground - ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 57

Kindness Among the Virtues

"We have so concentrated on one of the virtues - 'kindness' or mercy - that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. ... The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 50

Killing With Kindness

"There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness ... is separated from the other elements of Love, it infolves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 36

God Can't Do A Non-Thing

"If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.' ... Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 25

Christianity Creates the Problem of Pain

"Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described. It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is reighteous and loving."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 21

Separability of Morality & Religion

"We desire n0thing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous. Of all the jumps that humanity takes in its religious history this is certainly the most surprising. It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it; non-moral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a people, took the new step with perfect decision - I mean the Jews: but great individuals in all times and places have taken it also, and only those who take it are safe from the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralised worship or the cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 20

Knowing Forgiveness

"It seems we need someone to know us as we are - with all we have done - and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please."

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone, p. 261