Sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing. I mean by that, you are happily reading something, minding your own business and a perfectly good train of thought is interrupted by who knows Who?
Last night after a satisfying day of travelling, preaching, talking and catching up with various folk, I'm lying in bed reading, intending to lull myself closer to that edge where the closing of the eyelids gets easier than the holding of the book.
Then I read this from Nicholas Berdyaev, whom I hadn't anticipated as a voice in this book:
There are two symbols, bread and money; and there are two mysteries, the eucharistic mystery of bread and the Satanic mystery of money. We are faced with the great task; to overthrow the rule of money, and to establish in its place the rule of bread.
At which point thought, prayer and a sense of having been addressed took over. Oh, and when I say "sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing", I do mean us - each of us - all of us. While the politicians from Cameron to Blair indulge in diagnosis skewed by questionable political assumptions, Berdyaev's contrast of the two ways human beings live gets much nearer the reality - bread or money, and only one is eucharistic, that which proclaims the celebration of thanksgiving.
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