This Sunday’s readings: Luke 11:1-4
Reflections
A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted—the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1887, Congregationalist Clergyman
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
~ George Eliot, 1819-1880, Novelist/Poet
The main temptation is not to reject God outright, but to embrace God as something secondary and use God as an instrument for our own ends.
~ Miroslav Volf
For Hannah Arendt, it was not that Adolf Eichmann did not know what he was doing… It was that he did not think about what he was doing. The thoughtlessness that allows evil to flourish cannot be dispelled with new facts or better information, and the society that has forgotten how to think needs to do more than inform its citizens. Instead, like stretching unused muscles, it must relearn the daily habits of thinking.
~ Hannah LaGrand in Thoughtlessness, Sloth, and the Call to Think
In our members there is a slumbering inclination toward desire, which is both sudden and fierce. With irresistible power, desire seizes mastery over the flesh. All at once a secret, smoldering fire is kindled. The flesh burns and is in flames. It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity…or greed for money… Joy in God is in course of being extinguished in us as we seek all our joy in the creature.
At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real . . . Satan does not here fill us with contempt of God, but with forgetfulness of God… The powers of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us. The questions present themselves: “Is what the flesh desires really sin in this case?” “Is it really not permitted to me, yes—expected of me, now, here, in my particular situation, to appease desire?” […] It is here that everything within me.revolts against the Word of God. Powers of the body, the mind and the will, which were held in obedience under the discipline of the Word, of which I believed that I was the master, make it clear to me that I am by no means master of them…