“Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. it is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets! Ushers should issue live preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews! For the sleeping God may awake someday and take offense, or the waking G
od draw us to where we can never return.”–From Annie Dillard “Teaching a Stone to Talk” on the transfiguration.
I too pray that God will save me fro the safe middle ground of self-serving, domesticating deism.