"How many thousands picture Christianity as something old, sapless, joyless, mumbling in the chimney corner and casting sour looks at the young people's fun? How many think of religion as the enemy of life and the flesh and the pleasures of the flesh; a foe to all love and all delight? How many unconsciously conceive of God as rather like the famous lady who said, "Find out what the baby's doing and make him stop" ?
That is, how many of us both inside the Church and out have reduced the good news out of Nazareth to a list of thou-shalt-nots?
Quite a few, doubtless, or we should not always be worrying and teasing at the Decalogue and making reinterpretations like this one. Nor should we have so many materialist writers who talk sneeringly of "religionists" and their out-dated superstitions which interfere so unscientifically with man's fine, free gratification of his natural instincts (a term which in this context usually means only one instinct). True enough, we are having a religious revival at the moment. We are crying out to be rescued from the deadly terrors of the world we have made. Peace of mind, peace of soul, peace of heart-our spiritual leaders promise them all, and we, for whom there is no peace, snatch at them in our bewilderment and despair. God, for many of us, is a life preserver flung to a drowning man.
And so he is, if you happen to be drowning. But you can't drown all the time. Sooner or later you have to start merely living again; you reach shore, splutter the water out of your lungs--and then what? Throw away the life preserver? If your interest in God is based upon fear rather than love, very likely. In such a case, you will be willing to pay very high for that life preserver as you go down for the third time; you will ofter for it all your worldly treasures, your lusts and greeds and vanities and hates. But once safely on shore, you may be minded to throw it away and snatch your treasures back.
We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him. Otherwise our Christianity is no better than the cannibal's. We shall try to be negatively good, and make a virtue of misery; plume ourselves on the rejection of delights for which we are too weak, measure our piety by the number of pleasures we prohibit. And others will react against us by rejecting religion altogether, probably announcing with pride that they are choosing "life" instead. Saint Augustine phrased the Christian law as "have charity and do what you like." The modern materialist often makes it simply "do what you like," and then rushes off to ask his psychoanalyst why he no longer seems to like anything. Whereas the Pharisee, alas, tends to invert Augustine into: "Neither do what you like nor have charity."
Either way, this is not the good news but a counsel of despair and defeat, at best of escape. This is not the law of Moses but a meaningless law of fear: "Thou shalt not enjoy life" was never Christ's teaching; it is we who have brought our terror and impotence into religion, and then accused religion of bringing it to us. For we live in an age of fear, and we have infected our very faith with our paralysis, as certain previous ages infected it with their cruelty. No wonder the Decalogue makes us uncomfortable, We have turned it from a thrilling affirmation into a dull denial.
Yet there was the sound of trumpets in it once."
Joy Davidman in "Smoke on the Mountain", reaching through time and calming my greatest fear about faith.
