c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ In”Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith”(Riverhead), writer Kathleen Norris gives a fresh spin to some ancient Christian terms.
Prayer
Prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine.
Doubt
Perhaps my most important breakthrough with regard to belief came when I learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of my disbelief and my doubts as I was of my burgeoning faith.
Legalism
Christians have been adept, and remarkably inventive, at interpreting God’s commandments to cover just about anything they don’t approve of. The effect, of course, is to make the surpassingly large God of the scriptures into a petty Cosmic Patrolman.
Idolatry
I no longer think idolatry is a problem of primitive people in a simpler time, those who worshipped golden calves in fertility rites. I have only to open a newspaper to contemplate the wondrously various ways in which idolatry is alive in the here and now.
Feminism
While the (Christian) religion has often been used as an agent of women’s oppression, it also has had a remarkable ability to set women free.
Community
Anyone who knows a monastery well knows that it is no exaggeration to say that you find Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh living next door to each other. Mother Angelica and Mary Gordon. Barney Frank and Jesse Helms.
Sin
If you can’t ever admit to being a wretch, you haven’t been paying attention.
Pride
If there is any difference between the self-righteousness of the narrow-minded Christians who believe that being saved by Christ means that they are morally superior to everyone else, the New Age types who consider themselves more spiritually evolved than the common folk, or the devout free-thinkers who take pride in being beyond any need for God, I haven’t been able to detect it.
Conversion
If it serves us a bit too well, if it reinforces all our prejudices and allows us to call ourselves holy at the expense of others whom we can now judge to be unholy, it is probably not the real thing.
DEA END RABEY