Saturday 3 January 2009

The Listing Barque (part two)

The point I should have made in part one is simple: Satan does not mind in the least which side of the barque we fall off.

I am very aware that for reasons of temperament and history, my personal risk is to fal off to the right - but still I fly to that side of the barque, and see the real danger as the list to the left.

And I know many people with the mirror image response: their personal danger (it seems to me) is to fall off on the left, but they are so concerned about the dangers of the right, that they lean ever further to port...

2 comments:

George Carmody said...

"...but they are so concerned about the dangers of the right, that they lean ever further to port..."

I have come across many who fit that description, but they are wrong. They still have an image in their minds of the Church in the 1970s. They don't bother to inform themselves of how the Church is now - instead they just read "The Universe".

We all tend to form our views and prejudices in our early adulthood and are reluctant to re-examine them as the decades pass. That is what has happened to the 1960s and 70s generations. What they can't accept is that they have grown old and so, therefore, have the intellectual fashions of their youth. They grew up in the post-war period when the emotional mood of the time said that the worse crime was to be old-fashioned, a fuddy-duddy. They can't let go of that idea and their parishes have atrophied as a result. It is sad that the cult of youth has infected even the demonstrably aged. "You're as young as you feel!" they might reply. No, I would counter, you're old enough to know better.

Ben Trovato said...

Sounds as though we're seeing it the same way...