You have to become a personality, to have a mind and will of your own; you have to learn to see and then to judge, you have to acquire the wisdom of the serpent as well as the simplicity of the dove. But then, in the second place, you have to preserve precisely that simplicity; you have to avoid the self-willed piety, the determination to decide at all costs for yourself (and others) what is right and wrong, the idea (sublime) of the virtuous man as the self-made man (opposed to Godly infusion), which turns virtue from worship of God into something very like worship of self (very subtle). You must be able to listen with childlike simplicity to the voice of God and identify your will with His; then you need the strength and maturity of the grown man in order to make your obedience to the voice not the obedience of a slave or an automaton but the creative gift of a lover. (Jesus fulfilling the Law of Moses) –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’
Apr052016