My copy of “People of the Lie: the hope for healing human evil” by M. Scott Peck is overdue and I need to return it to the library. But there are some passages which are so good, so thought provoking that I wanted to record them. I have put up three posts with excerpts on “Resources Collected During My Journey” and here is a powerfully insightful quote on submission from page 83:
There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one’s own will- which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. We must ultimately belong to either God or the devil. This paradox was, of course expressed by Christ when he said “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it. And whosoever shall sole his life, for my sake, shall find it.”… As C. S. Lewis put it, “there is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” I suppose the only true state of freedom is to stand exactly halfway between God and the devil, uncommitted either to goodness or to utter selfishness. But that freedom is to be torn apart. It is intolerable… we nmust choose. One enslavement or the other.
