Friday, February 27th

SPRING BEGINS in the sky—we are having delicate pale blue skies and they reflect on the ocean, so it too is a blue I hardly ever see in the winter. But the earth is sodden and gray, some ice patches still not quite melted. Snowdrops are showing round the big maple! We are certainly being given an early spring (if it lasts!) to make up for harsh old January.

I wonder why it is that “inspirational” writing such as appears in The Reader’s Digest and in religious magazines so often, far from consoling or “uplifting,” makes me feel angry and upset. Most of the platitudes uttered are true, after all. But the fact is that this kind of superficial piety covers the real thing with a sugary icing meant to make it more palatable. It makes me feel sick. And the sickness is because I feel cheated. It debases God (by making him a kind of universal pal), and sentimentalizes Jesus, and—what is most dangerous and unchristian—it makes its communicants feel superior, part of an élite club where the saved can gather, shutting everyone else out. Into all this Tillich enters like a cleansing, ruthless wind. The thing that moved me so deeply when I read The Shaking of the Foundations came as an answer to my long anguish over the absence of God. The chapter called “Waiting” begins

“Both the Old and New Testaments describe our existence in relation to God as one of waiting.… The condition of man’s relation to God is first of all one of not having, not seeing, not knowing, and not grasping. A religion in which this is forgotten, no matter how ecstatic or active or reasonable, replaces God by its own creation of an image of God.… I am convinced that much of the rebellion against Christianity is due to the overt or veiled claim of the Christians to possess God, and therefore, also, to the loss of this element of waiting, so decisive for the prophets and the apostles.… They did not possess God, they waited for Him. For how can God be possessed? Is God a thing that can be grasped and known among other things? Is God less than a human person? We always have to wait for a human being.”