Real life is just like the spiritual life
Lee Ann was kind enough to leave a recipe for eggplant parmagiana in our comments box (by the way, I am starting the eggplant seeds indoors.) She also was kind enough to leave the URL for her blog, The Literarium. From her mega-post on Mega-Merton:
I don’t think you can have any kind of interior or spiritual life until you stop seeing things as you would like them to be, or fear they are, and start seeing them as they really are. As long as you focus on an illusion of a thing, on your idea of how it is or ought to be, you cannot respond to that thing. You can only respond to your self-created illusion. Only when you dispense with illusion and see things as they are can you respond to them and value them.
It’s almost depressing to think about how many problems — from the tiniest personal issues to international issues — arise from refusing to face things as they are instead of how one wishes they were.
Another good one:
This is why I have never liked the stripped-down, rather morbid Spartan Aesthetic of Protestantism and modern AmCatholicism. Nothing is less conducive to a connection with the majesty of God than a plain white box. Modern churches can be more like sensory deprivation chambers than churches. Plain walls with nothing to look at, a plain altar with nothing to look at, and an overall sense of being in a nicely appointed office building are the first things I call to mind when I think about modern churches. There is nothing religious about them. There is nothing that says you are in a special, sacred place for a special sacred purpose. Boring, uninspiring buildings push you farther and farther away from God. You can’t pay attention to Him when you’ve mentally fallen asleep. Maybe this is somewhat behind the craze for garish Hindu/ Mexican religious objects. After being deprived of spiritually inspiring, artistic rituals and worship aids, people are grasping for anything that will make faith lively. By excising the religious artistic tradition of the American Church, you are left with soul-numbing modernism or artificial, imported kitsch. Too many people lapse from faith because our houses of worship are so alienating and uninspiring. Beautiful churches can plant a seed of faith that True Religion can make grow. But something has to plant that seed.
There is a church not far from me that literally is a big white box. Whenever I go there I wish I had my sunglasses with me because of the darn glare. I feel like I’m in one of those 60’s science fiction dystopia movies, where after great exertion the hero has finally found the villian’s secret headquarters, and it turns out to be a single brilliantly lit but eerily silent room, housing the evil pulsing brain that controls the planet.
By the way, Lee Ann also writes for The Spinsters.