Are you a strange animal?

  • Thread starter Thread starter fisherman_carl
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
F

fisherman_carl

Guest
“this picture of the Church as Noah’s ark, sailing down through history, and all the saints were on board. There was St. Augustine leaning out of one window. Here was Thomas Aquinas leaning out of another window. And they were calling out to me. And they said, “Come aboard!” And I said, “Well, I’m going to the same place you are; I’m going to heaven.” And they said, “Yeah, but you’re aboard this little lifeboat. Why don’t you come aboard the ark?” And I said, “Well, there’s all sorts of weird animals on the ark.” And they said, “Well then, come aboard, because you’re one of them.” And I couldn’t resist the invitation.”
  • Peter Kreeft
youtu.be/-4eT_0tnj1w?list=RD-4eT_0tnj1w
 
An enlightened and fun way of seeing us as members of the Church. 😃

C. S. Lewis wrote something similar in defending mankind’s being an eternal entity not merely an earthly one:
For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!”, we exclaim “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is a strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined one day to become, one day, a land animal.
Click to expand...
IOW, we are strange animals because we long to be more than mere DNA has made us.

I see Kreeft’s idea being about the real inclusiveness of the Church. Every type of human being is welcome because we are all “strange” in our own way.
 
Everyone is strange–some stranger than others and I am one of the stranger ones.😃
 
"Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him. In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture him as a sort of horse on its hind legs, that we suddenly realise that he must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into the clouds of heaven.“ (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top