Father Elijah

I am reading (is an audiobook still reading?) Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (while I recover from the dentist!!!). And it is most interesting (while a little preachy.) So some quotes:

Was there a missing component in all human beings? The rural masses seeking the metropolis; the urban young fleeing to the woods. Women pretending to be men; men becoming more like women; everyone aping divinity in his desperation to escape creaturehood? Western youths seeking the Orient; orientals seeking capitalism? Monks abandoning their monasteries; married men pining for solitude. Liberals seeking to demythologize the Scriptures in an attempt to flee the exigencies of biblical faith; fundamentalists seeking to fill the empty places in their religion by a return to the Old Testament, fleeing the tasks of the baptized intellect. Was the promise always to be found elsewhere, always just beyond the next horizon? Why this persistent need for signs, wonders, new pillars of fire, arks of covenant, tablets of stone—anything other than the demands of raw, laborious, darkest faith?

“I’m not sure. Exterior enemies are only part of the problem. There’s trouble inside the House of God.”
“I have seen hints of it creeping into the journals.”
“Hints? Lord, what have you been reading! It’s everywhere.”
“Just how bad is it, do you think?”
“I don’t think anyone has an accurate reading on the extent of it. But I’d say it’s pretty big. It’s going to get worse.”
“Why is it happening?”
“A lot of reasons. Spiritual temptation first and foremost. Intellectual pride. The thrill of being revolutionaries. It’s the disease of the century. C. S. Lewis called these people Late Western Man. They’re educated, affluent, restless, and unfulfilled. They’re rational man explaining and theorizing all the way down as he sinks into a totally subjectivized world. What better project for him than the complete demolition and reconstruction of the House of God, right?”
“Is it as conscious as that?”
“Not for most of them. There’s a pattern to their assumptions. With few exceptions, their ideas might be roughly summed up this way: ‘I am an idealist but a realist; I hope for a collective solution of the human problem; I no longer believe (or never have believed) in a transcendent God and organized religion. I believe in the god in man.’ ”