recently, i’ve come across two quotes from two ladies that i deeply respect and i wanted to share them with you:

“The higher Christian churches – where, if anywhere, I belong — come
at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and
pomp, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of
creatures to have dealings with God.  I often think of the set pieces
of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to
God without their getting killed.  In the high churches they saunter
through the liturgy  like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who
have long since forgotten their danger.  If God were to blast such a
service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely
shocked.  But in the low churches you expect it any minute.  This is
the beginning of wisdom.”

–Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Perennial, 1977), 59.

“I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”

– Flannery O’Connor in a personal letter to Elizabeth Hester after being called a fascist