I’m sure I’m not the only person who can be aggravated by what is often described, not wrongly, as the pietism, quietism and even masochism of some versions of pre-Vatican II Catholicism and spirituality.
Against a spirituality that looks at suffering as something to be accepted and borne quietly, I find myself kicking and screaming about the Biblical message that God’s purpose is not to allow a select few to escape from this “vale of tears” to a place called Heaven, but rather of a good creation, beset by sin and death, where Christians are called not (just) to suffer, but to renew the face of the Earth and combat the powers and principalities. There can be a whiff of heresy there: sin and evil and death is no longer simultaneously an enormity and a great nothing from which God saves us, but rather tools that a strong-predestinarian God, a beyond-good-and-evil God, metes out to us according to His whim, and don’t you dare dislike it, because mystery and anyway Jesus went through worse. That old prayer, “Grant that I may love Thee always, and then do with me what Thou wilt” used to give me shivers of indignation.
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