Category: Excerpts

this is the meaning of all created things

I’m reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain for the first time, and enjoying it so far immensely. I imagine I’ll have a lot to say about it in the future, but for now, I just wanted to share this wonderful passage that stood to me, from early in the book. Merton here is describing the French town he and his father settled in during the late 1920s, Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val:

Here, in this amazing, ancient town, the very pattern of the place, of the houses and streets and of nature itself, the circling hills, the cliffs and trees, all focused my attention upon the one, important central fact of the church and what it contained. Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the dispostition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church. Every view of the town, from the exterior hills, centered upon the long grey building with it high spire.

The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of it intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d’Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rogue, to the winding river, and the green valley of the Bonnette, the town and the bridge, and even to the white stucco villas of the modern bourgeois that dotted the fields and orchards outside the precinct of the vanished ramparts: and the significance that was thus imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, or in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man’s reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole

Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative! Where all day long your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ!

What a thing indeed! May we all be blessed to dwell in such a coherent landscape, of both the world and the mind.

Excerpt #25: tacky worship

I think it is no accident that the thin character of much of mainline Protestant worship reflects as well as reproduces the superficial lives associated with Protestantism in America. No matter how well meant the efforts are to turn worship into entertainment, the result is the sentimental perversion of worship that fails to provide any resistance to the ugliness of our surrounding culture – an ugliness, perhaps, nowhere more apparent than in the unbridled licentiousness of people unashamed of their greed.

Of course, it may be objected that to suggest that tacky worship produces tacky people or tacky people produce tacky worship comes dangerously close to suggesting that moral and liturgical practice is a matter of taste. So let me be as clear as I can be. Moral and liturgical practice is a matter of taste. The problem is not that they are matters of taste, but rather the modern assumption that taste is but a matter of subjective opinion. Nothing tells us quite as much about people’s moral convictions are their taste. Nothing tells us quite as much about a church as how it worships. Goodness and beauty are rightly matters of taste, but a taste that has been learned from a people trained to worship the true God truly.

Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, page 161

Excerpt #24: dysfunctional life

While the world says, “believe what you want but make sure it remains a private preference,” we proclaim the exact opposite. Tolerating this worldview kills the mission of God in God’s church – following Jesus is not meant to make my life safe, secure, comfortable or more tolerable to a majority of Americans. It definitely won’t compartmentalize down to a nice, cozy pocket! In the same way, Jesus is larger than a political affiliation, so my allegiance to him should be greater than my allegiance to a political party. Following Jesus, as Hauerwas states, “is going to make my life dysfunctional to most Americans.”

Jason Barnhart, Sunday Asylum: Being the Church in Occupied Territory, page 89.