Tuesday, June 03, 2008

• Currently Listening Soviet Kitsch By Regina Spektor see related

  Jesus and Joan of Arc

  “Saints are generally regarded as people who experienced a dramatic moment of illumination that forestalled any further doubt or darkness and forever sweetened pain or suffering. But this is a skewed vision of sainthood; it is also terribly wrongheaded spirituality. For one thing, it implies that God plays favorites–that some people are selected for a gift that warms and leavens all of life while the rest of us stumble along, deprived of some mechanism that could make life so much easier. But making life easier for oneself, like ‘feeling good about oneself,’ has nothing to do with authentic faith, nor is a relationship with God something about which one reaches final clarity. Holiness lines in a process of becoming more fully human.

  “In the Christian tradition, for example, the only model for faith is Jesus of Nazareth. His proclamation, one observes in the New Testament, was not particularly religious: he spoke of God, certainly, but only in relation to ordinary human life with its quotidian struggle and suffering. Nor did he speak or preach in especially religious or sectarian terms; in fact, it may be said that Jesus came to set the world free from enslavement to and obsession with mere (humanly made) religion. ‘He went about doing good’ is the biblical summary of his life and mission, and no words are more moving or provocative.”

  [exerpt from Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint, by Donald Spoto]

  Originally posted on my blog here.

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