“Letting your soul, or whatever fancy name you like to give it, out of its cage and into the daylight is perhaps the hardest thing anyone can do.”
― Mister God, This is Anna
― Mister God, This is Anna
“Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: "And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don't forget to love yourself." The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The ide
a of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with
Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, churchgoing and "Mister God" talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message whenyou were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was "just for swank.”
― Mister God, This is Anna
a of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with
Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, churchgoing and "Mister God" talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message whenyou were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was "just for swank.”
― Mister God, This is Anna
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”
― The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
― The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
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