I was just reading Henri Nouwen’s The Way of The Heart, p.11. He quotes my favorite contemplative Thomas Merton: “Society…was regarded [by the Desert Fathers] as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life…These were men who believed that to let oneself drift alone, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.” The Wisdom of the Desert. (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp.,1960),p.3
Nouwen goes on to say, “This observation leads us straight to the core of the problem. Our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul. The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people’s fatal state and have lost the power and motivation to swim for our own lives.”
That writing is almost 30 years old now and yet many in the church go unchanged, treading water at best!
Oh no, I did it again.