I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
C.S.Lewis
Tag: religion
We treat our spiritual lives like the round of golf
‘Church isn’t boring because we’re not showing enough film clips, or because we play an organ instead of guitar. It’s boring because we neuter it of its importance. Too often we treat our spiritual lives like the round of golf used to open George Barna’s Revolution. At the end of my life, I want my friends and family to remember me as someone who battled for the Gospel, who tried to mortify sin in my life, who found hard for life, and who contended earnestly for the faith. Not just a nice guy who occasionally noticed the splendor of the mountains God created, while otherwise just trying to enjoy myself, manage my schedule, and work on my short game.
-Ted Kluck, from Why We Love The Church: In Praise of Institutions And Organized Religion
HT: Pyromaniacs: I Lose, You Win (via nickbogardus) (via papertowngirl)
Searching for a perfect utopia
know anyone like this? okay, okay, don’t start pointing fingers…
“many of us are so bad because we’re trying so hard to be good…. some of us are trying so hard to be good because and we’re trying to keep the bad people out… you’re the ones that are complaining about everything… you’re looking for this perfect utopia where everybody does everything just so and usually it is according to the morals you set up by picking and choosing form various churches and various moral agencies and you’re saying, ‘these are the things you have to have to line up to be right and we won’t be part of you until become one of us.’ ….you’re the folks that won’t join a church because they don’t do everything just so and you’re not willing to even dialogue about it and if it’s not this way it’s no-way…”
-kurt hannah
//
over the weekend i was asked, on a couple occasions, why people abandon the faith of their childhood. i fidgeted, looked out the window, & offered some anecdotal comments anemic of any real answers. anthony bradley offers a more articulate response to why people move from youth group to agnosticism. but i didn’t have an answer, nor do i have fond memories of youth group.
church youth group, for me, was a dull experience in perseverance. most of the youth attended the church’s christian school. a couple of us attended the public school & were reminded that we were pagans within a cathedral. “why would i want to invite friends from school to youth group?” i asked myself. “to be ostracized like me?”
somewhere in those murky years of high school i turned to books for companionship & writing poetry for private enterprise. maybe not in the way wallace stevens did: “after one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” i felt abandoned, but did not seek to abandon.
perseverance, poetry, & a feeble faith have traveled with me, but members of the youth group seem to be pebbles in a path long ago traversed.
Coffeehouse Junkie 