Following Christ, living in the real world

"As Christians we are always in tension - in anguish and at the same time in bliss. This is mad, ridiculous. But it is true - accepting the dark night just as we accept the brilliance of the day. We have to make an act of surrender - if I am in Christ, there are moments where I must share the cry of the Lord on the cross and the anguish in the garden of Gethsemane. There is a way of being defeated, even in our faith - and this is a way of sharing the anguish of the Lord. I don't believe we should ever say, 'This cannot happen to you'. If we are Christians we should go through this life, accepting the life and the world, not trying to create a falsified world.

"But, on the other hand, the Christian is like someone who lives in three dimensions in a world in which the majority of of people live in two. People who live freely and within a dimension of eternity will always find that something is wrong, they will always find themselves being the odd man out. The same problem was faced by the early Christians when they said their only king was God. People turned round to them and said, 'If you say that you are disloyal to our king' and often persecuted them. But the only true way of being loyal to this two-dimensional world is to be loyal to the three-dimensional world, because in reality the world is three-dimensional. If you really live in three dimensions and do not simply live in two and imagine the third, then life will be full and meaningful" Metropolitan Anthony Bloom from an interview that serves as the introduction to his indispensable book Beginning to Pray.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis