I find myself surprised at how often the things that were happening in culture of those days are the very same we deal with today.
Conflict in relationships is probably the greatest weakness we are faced today as a nation. Here are a few excerpts I've found quite interesting.
I hope you find a nugget of information that will be helpful for you in your daily life.
“One can never foresee the means
that God will use to touch a man’s
heart, the roads along which he will drive him, nor the moment at which he will
intervene in his life. It may be at the
height of happiness, or in the midst of a painful crisis. It may be within a fervent religious
community, or in utter solitude. It may
be by means of a slow process of evolution, or quite suddenly and
unexpectedly. But it is always through the
free intervention of the Spirit.”
“Constraint is the negation of all
spiritual life. We can help others by
telling them of our experiences and convictions. But let us have the honesty to tell them of
our failures and doubts as well. Above
all, we must beware of the natural inclination which makes us think that others
must come to faith by the same road as ourselves. If we exert any sort of pressure upon them,
we shall inevitably harm them. Pressure
of that kind will either force their decision, in which case we shall be
usurping God’s place; or else it will arouse their resistance, and we shall
have become for them an obstacle to faith.”
“The rewarding thing about
introspection of this sort is not so much what one discovers as the fact that
one discovers it. in fact, as we
perceive, time and time again, that we are more bankrupt than we imagined, that
the things we thought we could put down on the credit side must often rather be
put down as debits, that weakness hides even under our strong reactions, we
undergo the most fruitful of human experiences.
We abandon our futile attempts to save ourselves from our inner disquiet
by means of victories in the social struggle, by drawing comfort from our
reputation and all that we do to fortify it.
Rather do we turn at last towards God, the only true answer to human
distress.”
That is the only way to get the
insight which will enable us to discriminate in our own lives between genuine
acts of will and mere automatic reactions – we must turn towards God in
prayer.” … “In the silence before God we soon see that this action or that
remark was not in conformity with his will, that they were weak or strong
reactions, cowardly flight or proud bravado, the aim of which in either case
was to preserve us from our uneasy conscience.
In the
silence before God we thus come gradually to a better knowledge of ourselves;
we come to know more clearly , at one and the same time, what are our
weaknesses and sins and the quite new road we must follow in order to overcome
them – that we must confess them in order to receive the divine pardon, instead
of hiding them in order to receive the praises of men.
Prayer
will not deliver us from our natural reactions, whether weak or strong; but it
will bring us to recognize them for what they are, and thus continually to
fresh experiences of grace.”
“Does mans value lie in his strength, in his aptitude for
elbowing his way through life, for extricating himself from difficulties, for
defending himself and imposing his will on others? Such are the questions which crowd in on our
minds.
A man’s
true value consists in his likeness to God.
What gives value to his thoughts, his feelings and his actions, is the
extent to which they are inspired by God, the extent to which they express the
thought, the will, and the acts of God.
Sometimes, it is God’s power which is manifested in a man’s courage, in
the authority with which he speaks and the strength with which he acts. But sometimes, also, it is Gods tenderness
which we observe in the heart of one who is weak, his creative suffering that
we discover in a tormented soul.”
“The fact is that our whole civilization suggests to us a
false scale of values. It accords
positive value to all that is strong, and negative value to all that is
weak. It is shameful to be weak,
sensitive, pitiable, or affectionate.”
“What mankind needs in our day, if its to escape the
catastrophe towards which it is being led by our rationalist and technical
civilization, is just these qualities of kindness, conscience, emotion,
sensitiveness, beauty, and intuition, which lie repressed and asleep deep in
the hearts of those whom that civilization despises.
These
are real ‘ frozen assets’. Instead of
being mobilized as a matter of urgency, they are locked up in broken lives,
which are discarded because they are labeled ‘weak’.”
“But we are well aware that along with our successes we have
known defeat, and that no doctrine and no experience has been able to preserve
us from it. And the further we advance
in the Christian life the more we become aware of our sin. It is as if weights were continually being
added to one of the pans of a balance; and each time this happens we need more
of God’s grace in the other pan in order to re-establish the equilibrium. But this equilibrium is always unstable, so
that the very slightest weight is enough to upset it; discouragement and doubt
are at our door. it is then that we are
tempted to shut our eyes to our defeats, to go back to the old method of
covering up by means of strong reactions – and the temptation is the greater
the further we think we have advanced along the road of the spiritual
life. But to do so would be at the same
time to deprive ourselves of the grace which alone can redress the balance.”
“God wants us to love in ourselves the person created by him
in his image, worthy of being tended with care, of being protected so that it
may grow properly. It must indeed be
pruned, but so that it may bring forth fruit, not so as to destroy it.”
