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A reflection for Lent (1)
Friday 3 March 2006
Here´s a good quote I came across while preparing a sermon for this Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent: There is, of course, a negative element or aspect in all genuine religion. No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the realisation of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature. Sometimes the eye that hinders must be plucked out or the right hand cut off and thrust away for the sake of a freer pursuit of the soul’s kingdom. There is, too, a still deeper principle of negativity involved in the very fibre of personal life itself. No one can advance without surrender, no one can have gains without losses, no one can reach great goals without giving up many things in themselves desirable. There is “a rivalry of mes” which no person can ever escape, for in order to choose and achieve one typical self another possible self must be sternly sacrificed. In a very real sense it remains for ever true that we must die to live, we must die to the narrow self in order to be raised to the wider and richer self.
Rufus Jones Spiritual Reformers in the C16 and C17
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