Saturday, July 6, 2013

Poetry and liberal Protestantism vs. Religion / Flannery O'Connor

Yesterday's Flannery O'Connor Quote from FB. 

"One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention. This seems to be about where you find yourself now. Of course, I am a Catholic and I believe the opposite of all this." - Letter to Alfred Corn, June 16, 1962


I think I have come across this.  
One can learn a few things from Catholic writers.  

It can happen.  

Poetry is fantastic 
and human life is sacred and deep.  
Therapy can be loving and profound. 
Wisdom, wit and wild abandon to art, freedom and joy 
can be ecstatic, bold and sublime.

Knowing me and knowing you,
stirs me in the deepest places.

Our spirit is 
so much more than
reductionist biology.

We can sense the divine.

And we can sense the evil.

We hope and we fear and we lose and we cry
and we falter and try again,
and seek the eyes of another.

We cannot be alone.

But God, who is he?  Does he hear me?
Does he really love me, like they say?

Poetry can't tell me. 
Therapy can't tell me. 


No comments: