'The full, horrifying, exhilarating truth is that if you actually look at the tenets of Christianity they tell you that good behaviour is only the baseline, the launching pad, the sine qua non. The point at which Christianity takes off and begins to glow is when it does become counter-intuitive and downright troublesome in worldly terms. There are some very disturbing, subversive instructions there: 'Sell all thou hast and give to the poor...turn the other cheek...judge not, that ye shall not be judged...blessed are the meek...lay not treasures on earth...consider the lilies of the field....'
These are not sensible injunctions, fit for a Lord Chesterfield letter or a newspaper leader column. They sit uneasily in a society convinced that decent people are those who own property and are constantly busy, getting and spending. They sound odd in a time when every group bristles with awareness of its "rights" and is determined to stand on the and sue for compensation at the slightest, even accidental, tap to its cheek.
They sit uneasily too, with the tough landlording policies over the years of the Church Commissioners in England, with the arrogant obduracy of feuding clerics in the great cathedrals, with the wealth of the Vatican, with the argument against priestly celibacy which focuses on the "natural right" to a married life, with the snobberies and snarlings of different layers of Catholic and Anglo-Catholic spokesmen, and with the fact that more and more clergymen are joining trade unions and speaking with a blush of their "security" and "career structures."'
Libby Purves, Holy Smoke, p.186.
