When any man comes into the presence of God he will find, whether he wishes it or not, that all those things which seemed to make him so different from the men of other times, or even from his earlier self, have fallen off him. He is back where he always was, where every man always is. Eadem sunt omnia semper [‘Everything is always the same’]. Do not let us deceive ourselves. No possible complexity which we can give to our picture of the universe can hide us from God: there is no copse, no forest, no jungle thick enough to provide cover. We read in Revelation of Him that sat on the throne ‘from whose face the earth and heaven fled away’. It may happen to any of us at any moment. In the twinkling of an eye, in a time too small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed. And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.
My first piece for Mere Orthodoxy is up today: What If There Is No Such Thing as ‘Biblical’ Productivity?
Currently reading: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling 📚
It is hard to generalize about a whole nation as large and complex as our own, but it might not be far wrong to say that the characteristic flesh of America is compounded of covetousness, gluttony, egocentric libertarianism and pride, all of which have been selectively bred into our culture because of the types of sinful people we have attracted and the behavior which our political and economic system has stressed and rewarded. It is true that all of these vices are simply distortions of virtues which are part of the American ideal (ambition, enterprise, freedom, self-respect). But our immediate tendency to defend ourselves when accused of these defects is usually a sign of that unconscious subjection to universal sin which corporate flesh involves. The Christian cultures of other nations, especially those of third-world Evangelical churches, can easily detect the fact that most American Christians have their lives organized around the kingdom of business success and not the kingdom of God.
The end of an era
