You are to be found in the lowest, darkest depths, and that all who find You are thereby transported to the loftiest, brightest heights.
The ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens we cannot forget our true homeland, which is that other kingdom You proclaimed.
It was bad enough when the clergy identified themselves with the social and political status quo; now that they are ready to support any deviation from it, and champion anyone who can produce credentials, however dubious, of being down-trodden and oppressed, it is even worse.
I have come to regard clerical Christianity and its officers as totally farcical - as Kierkegaard puts it, a folding screen behind which the Christian evades the real seriousness of being a Christian. Momentarily, I have to admit, with Protestant romanticism I toyed with the notion that the Roman Catholic Church, with its longer tradition, tougher discipline and more rigid doctrine, would prove an exception, and manage to resist the Gadarene slide on which the other denominations had embarked so blithely and disastrously. However mistaken I was!
The tide of the twentieth century was flowing in a different direction altogether. It was the picture palaces, their fronts so brilliantly lighted, inside so mysteriously dark, that provided our true churches and chapels.
Only as children of God are we equal; all other claims to equality - social, economic, racial, intellectual, sexual - only serve in practice to intensify inequality.
In this quest for You we look without finding and find without looking.
Preoccupation with ritual has always seemed to me comparable, in matters of worship, with preoccupation with erotic techniques in matters of sex.
The imagination recoils from the prizes or toys of a materialistic society. Who but some half-witted oil sheik or popular actor can go on desiring sleek yachts or motor cars or white villas perched above yellow sand? Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society, with its own mysteries-this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me!-and its own sacred texts and scriptures-the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and the unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!
It was padding down the streets of Moscow that the other dream-the kingdom of heaven on earth-dissolved for me, never to be revived. Those gray anonymous figures, likewise padding about the streets, seemed infinitely remote, withdrawn, for ever strangers, yet somehow near and dear. The gray streets were paradise, the eyeless buildings the many mansions of which heaven is composed.
How infinitely preferable it is to be abhorred, rather than embraced, by those in authority. Where the distinction between God and Caesar is so abundantly clear, no one in his senses - or out of them for that matter - is likely to suggest that any good purpose would be served by arranging a dialogue between the two of them. In the Communist countries an unmistakable and unbridgable abyses divides the kingdoms of the earth and Your kingdom, with no crazed clerics gibbering and grimacing in the intervening no-man's land. It provides the perfect circumstances for the Christian faith to bloom anew. I look eastwards, not westwards, for the new Star of Bethlehem.
At the intersection of time and eternity - nailed there - You confront us; a perpetual reminder that, living, we die and, dying, we live. An incarnation wonderful to contemplate; the light of the world, indeed.
Though in terms of history the darkness falls, blacking out us and our world, You have overcome history. You came as light into the world, that whoever believed in You should not remain in darkness. The promise stands forever. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Nor ever will.
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