If you will picture the scene. It was either 1979 or 1980 - I can't remember which - making me an early twenties something. I was a music student at university studying composition back in the days when I wanted to compose symphonies. I was madly in love, my very first adult love, with a fellow music student. But of course the answer was no. It always has been no.
One of our lecturers asked our class out to a holiday home of his, a bach in New Zealand parlance, to do some gardening and help out around the place one weekend in return for some good company - i always liked this man - one Graham Hollobon, and bed and board.
Heartbroken due to being love lorn I went and did some hard labour hoping to drown my sorrows in work. After all, and I am being ironical here," Arbeit" does "macht frei." But of course the slavery here was of my own imposition, not that of my friend and lecturer nor any staff member of student of Canterbury University in my salad days.
But the thing I remembered most from this distant working weekend was that in his lounge one day I opened a Time magazine and of course went to the religion section, and read some piece of heretical trash and of course was angry. What it was totally escapes me. It may have been about the papacy given that John Paul II, who I, rejecting the imposture of bishops of Rome adopting what amounts to throne names, still call Karol Woytila, was only recently elected. But it may not have been.
Mr H said something the essence of which I never forgot, and the point of my posting this here, namely that religious fanatics - but i don't recall his using such a hurtful word as fanatic though it was true - will look forsomething to be angry at, and will go to, as in this instance, religious articles in magazines with the intention of being angry at it.
He was absolutely right. I do not know if I ever thanked hin for this insight . I don't even know if he is still alive, it being some 37 or 38 years ago whereby I could thank him for it now.
Biut I never forgot it.
Loving nothing in any truly spiritual fashion - my love for the young woman I mention here, given my maturity of lack thereof in christ, was not spiritual - I could only signal my virtue, if only to myself, by finding something to hate. I could only fill the emptiness of a life already backslidden from Christ with in a year or two of my conversion, with ungodly anger at something to hate
And something to hate is to be found in superabundance.
This I see time and time again among all manner of social justice activists and unfortunately among Christians. Secular haters may have no alternative, but we who profess Christ do and it shows our backsliding or immaturity that we Christians are no different for all our lies, and in telling lies about ourselves we are past masters, about our live for the lost
One of our lecturers asked our class out to a holiday home of his, a bach in New Zealand parlance, to do some gardening and help out around the place one weekend in return for some good company - i always liked this man - one Graham Hollobon, and bed and board.
Heartbroken due to being love lorn I went and did some hard labour hoping to drown my sorrows in work. After all, and I am being ironical here," Arbeit" does "macht frei." But of course the slavery here was of my own imposition, not that of my friend and lecturer nor any staff member of student of Canterbury University in my salad days.
But the thing I remembered most from this distant working weekend was that in his lounge one day I opened a Time magazine and of course went to the religion section, and read some piece of heretical trash and of course was angry. What it was totally escapes me. It may have been about the papacy given that John Paul II, who I, rejecting the imposture of bishops of Rome adopting what amounts to throne names, still call Karol Woytila, was only recently elected. But it may not have been.
Mr H said something the essence of which I never forgot, and the point of my posting this here, namely that religious fanatics - but i don't recall his using such a hurtful word as fanatic though it was true - will look forsomething to be angry at, and will go to, as in this instance, religious articles in magazines with the intention of being angry at it.
He was absolutely right. I do not know if I ever thanked hin for this insight . I don't even know if he is still alive, it being some 37 or 38 years ago whereby I could thank him for it now.
Biut I never forgot it.
Loving nothing in any truly spiritual fashion - my love for the young woman I mention here, given my maturity of lack thereof in christ, was not spiritual - I could only signal my virtue, if only to myself, by finding something to hate. I could only fill the emptiness of a life already backslidden from Christ with in a year or two of my conversion, with ungodly anger at something to hate
And something to hate is to be found in superabundance.
This I see time and time again among all manner of social justice activists and unfortunately among Christians. Secular haters may have no alternative, but we who profess Christ do and it shows our backsliding or immaturity that we Christians are no different for all our lies, and in telling lies about ourselves we are past masters, about our live for the lost
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