girltheology

As a 32 year old "Gen X'ish" (depending on your definition) ordained minister, I've found myself in several positions in the last year where I had to defend my 'faith' against reason. While I think that the following excerpt from St. Augustine's Confessions leave Christianity open to its own criticism (for to say that Christians are never guilty of this same offense would be hugely inappropriate - perhaps moreso now). Yet, I find that it's important for me to read these words to remind myself of the tradition of intention in my faith... the self-critical position of many who have given their lives as an act of faith, depsite the fallibility of our lives as Christians. I know it's an ideal that many could/do find fault with, but I'm in love with this passage:

O Lord my God, be patient, as you always are, with the men of this world as you watch them and see how strictly they obey the rules of grammar which have been handed down to them, and yet ignore the eternal rules of everlasting salvation which they have received from you. A man who has learnt the traditional rules of pronunciation, or teaches them to others, gives greater scandal if he brekas them by dropping the aitch from 'human being' than if he breaks your rules and hates another human, his fellow man. This is just as perverse as to imagine that our enemies can do us more harm than we do to ourselves by hating them, or that by persecuting another man we can damage him more fatally than we damage our own hearts in the process. O God, alone in majesty, high in the silence of heaven, unseen by man! we can see how your unremitting justice punishes unlawful ambition with blindness, for a man who longs for fame as a fine speaker will stand up before a human judge, surrounded by a human audience, and lash his opponent with malicious invective, taking the greatest care not to say 'uman' instead of 'human' by a slip of the tongue, and yet the thought that the frenzy in his own mind may condemn a human being to death disturbs him not at all.

St. Augustine's Confessions Book 1, 18.