Chapter Two: Transparency
"To have the mind of Christ Jesus, to think his thoughts, share his ideals, dream his dreams, throb with his desires, replace our natural responses to persons and situations with the concern of Jesus, and make the mind-set of Christ so completely our own that 'the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me' (Galatians 2:20), is not the secret of or the shortcut to transparency. It is transparency."
"The endless struggle for enough money, good feelings, and prestige yields a rich harvest of worry, frustration, suspicion, anger, jealousy, anxiety, fear, resentment. These powerful, emotion-backed desires cause 99 percent of the self-inflicted and unnecessary suffering in our lives. They continually focus our attention on self and keep us from being transparent, dimming the light and obscuring 'the glory of God in the face of Christ' (2 Corinthians 4.6)."
"It is the ego-dominated self that keeps us locked in a series of competitive moves and countermoves, that induces us to manipulate people and control situations, that for most of us destroys inner peace and serenity in our lives. Trapped in the quest for security, pleasure, and power, our moment-to-moment thoughts are concentrated on the dark pursuit of illusory happiness, and we are thus inattentive to the Lord of Light. Our eyes are not fixed on Christ Jesus but on ourselves. We settle for a roller-coaster ride of exhilarating peaks and vertiginous valleys, interspersed with long periods of driving, pushing, and suffering in various degrees."
"The anxious, darting, filmy eyes of many Christians are the manifestations of a heart beclouded by the worries of the world. The translucent eyes of others radiate the simplicity and joy of a heart fixed on Jesus Christ, the Light of the World."
"[Jesus] pours out the Holy Spirit to form the holy People of God, a community of prophets and lovers who will surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who will live in ever greater fidelity to the shattering, omnipresent Word, who will enter into the center of all that is, into the very heart and mystery of God, into the center of that flame that consumes and purifies and sets all aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant love."
"The church-at-large still scans the horizon awaiting the fiery glow of the new Pentecost. The Communist who accepts Karl Marx but not his doctrine is scarcely different from the Christian who accepts Jesus Christ but refuses to shape his life according to Christ's teaching... Paul's cheeks are still streaked because of the tepidity, rank insincerity, spiritual adultery, indifference to prayer, and apostolic sloth that dapple the Christian life in America today."
"[Jesus'] message is not a reassurance to keep right on doing what we've been doing, but, writes Edward O'Connor, 'a summons to the labor of eliminating from our lives, faithfully and perseveringly, everything in us that is opposed to the work and the will of his Holy Spirit for us... Whenever faith is accepted merely as a closed system of well-defined doctrines, we lost contact with the living God. The faith that saves is a surrender to God."
"The gospel presses us to painful honesty. If nothing else, we ought to be sincere. Get out and pant with the moneymaking street, become hedonists, and 'eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we will die,' or repent and turn to the spirit of the gospel."
"'What the gospel of Jesus Christ offers us,' Thomas Merton observes, 'is not a false peace which enables us to avoid the implacable light of judgment, but the grace to courageously accept the bitter truth that is revealed to us; to abandon our inertia, our egoism, and submit entirely to the demands of the Spirit, praying earnestly for help, and giving ourselves generously to every effort asked of us by God.'"
"Saint Augustine complained, 'Many who had already come close on the way to believing are frightened away by the bad lives of evil and false Christians. How many, my brothers, do you think there are who want to become Christians but are put off by the evil ways of Christians?' If the searcher after truth finds Christians to be just as self-absorbed, guilt-ridden, hopeless, unsure of their foundations, and haunted by the same fears as he is, just as much at sea in an alien environment, and just as perplexed generally, it is small wonder that he feels no attraction to the church."
Manning quotes a 23-year-old woman doing graduate work in Paris: "To me a Christian is either a man who lives in Christ or a phony. You Christians do not appreciate that it is on this--the almost external testimony that you give of God--that we judge you. You ought to radiate Christ. Your faith ought to flow out to us like a river of life. You ought to infect us with a love for him. It is then that God who was impossible becomes possible for the atheist and for those of us whose faith is wavering. We cannot help being struck, upset, and confused by a Christian who is truly Christlike. And we do not forgive him when he fails to be."
"We will never move people to Jesus Christ and the gospel merely by making speeches about them. Edward Schillebeeckx is blunt: 'People, to put it bluntly, have had their bellyful of sermonizing. They want a source of strength for their lives. We can only recommend this strength by making it actively present in our own lives.' Contact with Christians should be an experience that proves to people that the gospel is a power that transforms the whole of life. Instead, our presence in the world is often marked by rank insincerity, a dilution of grace, and a failure to act on the Word."
"'It is not uncommon,' as Ralph Martin notes, 'for many Christians to have a seriously incomplete idea of what the Scriptures say about Jesus Christ. Many have a vague idea of Jesus as 'a good guy' who helped the poor and told people to love one another. They operated with a fuzzy, almost symbolic notion of Jesus as the symbol for a liberal's idea of goodness.' Those who say, 'Jesus would never hurt anyone,' often mean to rule out the possibility that he would ever ask someone to repent or go through the pain of recognizing his brokenness. To believe that all Jesus calls us to is to be nice to each other is to substitute the Christ of Christian humanism for the Christ of Saint Paul..."
"[The Christ we see in Hebrews] is no Christ the humanitarian, Christ the master of interpersonal relationships, or Christ the buddy. It is Christ the Lord and Savior who calls us to repent, change our lives, and strike out in a new direction... [When we see Christ as Christ the humanitarian, a] loose goodwill toward the world replaces the radical conversion and explicit death to self that the gospel demands... The tone of the Christ of God is not always sweet and consoling. The gospel is the Good News of gratuitous salvation, but it does not promise a picnic on a green lawn."
"There is nobody in the Christian community who is not called to continual conversion. There is no one who does not still have before him the labor of building up the image of Jesus Christ in his life by the steady practice, day by day, of Christian virtues."
"[Christianity] comprises more than involvement in human rights struggles, environmental causes, or peace programs. Fullness of life in the Spirit is more than finding Christ in others and serving him there. It is a summons to personal holiness, ongoing conversion, and new creation through union with Christ Jesus."
"Jesus does not say, 'Come to a day of renewal, a retreat, a prayer meeting, a liturgy,' but 'come to me.' Is this the self-flattering superiority of a religious fanatic? Yes, if he is not the Savior of the world. He is either an egoist or the Risen Lord who must be proclaimed as the world's only hope."
"The Christ of Paul was not merely a great teacher, an example of a great man, or a symbol of man's noblest aspirations; he was Lord and Savior. To reinterpret Jesus any other way is to bleed Christianity of its point."
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