Sunday, September 20, 2009

This Week in Summary & Thoughts Before Mass Tonight

I'm going to a new church tonight (it's still Roman, don't get your hopes up) and I'm hoping that there's confession/reconcilliation before Mass. I've had a terrible week and my Depression had really kicked in. I think I angered everyone I know this week both online and IRL (for non-gamers this means "in real life"). Chesterton said that we don't need a religion that is right where we're right, we need one that's right where we're wrong. I said to a friend once "when I disagree with Catholicism, I get angry and yell and dispair, but eventually I realize that it's not the Church that needs to change, it's me".

I highlighted this in C.S. Lewis' "The Problem of Pain" but I just saw it quoted online by Dave Armstrong, so I figured I'd post it as I'm hoping to go to confession tonight:

"It is . . . a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diminution." Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall." - C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain, New York: Macmillan, 1940, 97-98)

Father forgive me of my sins, because of Christ, even when I repent out of fear rather than love, or rather, when they are so close together I can't separate them.

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