god-haunted: faith, martyrdom, and the romanticization of suffering in religion
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god-haunted: faith, martyrdom, and the romanticization of suffering in religion
To further aggravate our emotional woes, modernity has cast aside what had been, since the dawn of time, a central resource for coping with life’s vicissitudes. God has died and there is now little we can turn to, intone in front of, or beg for deliverance from when times grow hard. We dwell in a world ruled by the pitiless laws of science in which
... See moreAlain de Botton • A Therapeutic Journey
Should we expect to be forsaken—by God or the world or both?
Yes, perhaps by the world—and we will feel forsaken by God. But in Christ, we never actually are. The pattern of the faithful is not to avoid the pit, but to find God there—even when it seems He’s gone. That’s the paradox of Psalm 88 and the passion of Jesus: the dark is not the end. It is... See more
Yes, perhaps by the world—and we will feel forsaken by God. But in Christ, we never actually are. The pattern of the faithful is not to avoid the pit, but to find God there—even when it seems He’s gone. That’s the paradox of Psalm 88 and the passion of Jesus: the dark is not the end. It is... See more
It is precisely because we have a natural desire for the supernatural, as Henri de Lubac put it, that this arc of human hunger is prone to warping, tempted to find its rest in god-like substitutes like power, or parodies of religion like the military, or even the belonging one finds in a narco-gang, as if it were a sorry shadow of the civitas Dei.
... See moremailchi.mp • Sin Eaters in a Sacramental Cosmos
What I can do, what I’m trying to do, is put into words how hard it is to be without religion. To feel your way through this world without moral guidance. To exist without any sense that you belong to something bigger. To have nothing to atone for; nobody to feel indebted to. And to show that yes, we might not be shackled to old-fashioned morality ... See more
N.S. Lyons • A World In Upheaval
We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite.