Worth reading

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A transcription is now available for Peter Kreeft's 10 year old talk How to Win the Culture War. It's still valuable reading. I suggest you go do so. Here's a snippet to entice you:


Here is one of the most wonderful and terrifying sentences I have ever read, from William Law's Serious Call, "If you will look into your own heart in utter honesty, you must admit that there is one and only one reason why you are not even now a saint. You do not wholly want to be."

That insight is terrifying because it is an indictment, but it is wonderful and hopeful because it is also an offer, an open door. Each of us can become a saint. We really can. We really can. I say it three times, because I think we do not really believe that deep down. For if we did, how could we endure being anything less?

What holds us back? Fear of paying the price. What is the price? The answer is simple. T. S. Eliot gave it when he defined Christianity as "a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)." The price is everything--100 percent. Martyrdom, if required, and probably a worse martyrdom than the quick noose or stake, the martyrdom of dying daily, dying every minute for the rest of your life. Dying to all your desires and plans--including your plans about how to become a saint.

---snip---

But how? We always want to know how. Give me a method, a technology, a means to this end. What does that question mean, "How can I become a saint?" Or "Give me a means to the end of sanctity." It means, "Give me something that is easier than sanctity, which will cause sanctity. So that if I do this something or attain this something, then this something will be the middle term, the link between me and sanctity."

No. There is none. No prayers, no meditations, no 12-steps programs, no yogas, no psychological techniques, no techniques at all. There can be no button to push for sanctity, any more than for love. For sanctity is simply love: loving God with all your soul and mind and strength.

How do you love? You just do it. A cause cannot produce an effect greater than itself. And nothing in the world is greater than sanctity, nothing greater than love. Therefore, no cause, no human cause, can produce sanctity. There can never be any technology for sanctity.

Of course, God is its cause. Grace is its cause. The Holy Spirit is its cause. "Oh well, why doesn't God cause it then? If sanctity isn't a do-it-yourself thing but an only-God-can-do-it thing, then why doesn't God make me a saint? If only grace can do it, why doesn't He give me that grace?"

Because you don't want it. If you wanted it, He'd give it. He promised that: "All who seek find." It's back to "just say yes." It's infinitely simpler than we think, and that's why it's hard. The hard word in the formula "just say yes" is the word "just."

We are comfortable with Christ and theology or Christ and psychology or Christ and America or Christ and the Republican Party or Christ and the Democratic Party or Christ and phonics or Christ and dieting. But just plain Christ, all Christ, Christ drunk straight, not mixed, we find far too dangerous for our tastes.

Aslan is not a tame lion. Just say yes to Him? You never know what he'd do with you!

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This page contains a single entry by MamaT published on October 8, 2008 12:30 AM.

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