One of the most intricate challenges facing us as human beings, as well as those circumstances where we are playing a leader's role, is to avoid intellectualizing our faith, so that it is divorced from feeling. In his excellent book, The Devil's Advocate, Morris West has this counsel for a discouraged cleric:
". . . the problem is that . . . we have reduced the faith to an intellectual conception, an arid assent of the will, because we have not seen it working in the lives of common folk. We have lost pity and fear and love. We are the guardians of mysteries but have lost our awe of them. We work by canon and not by charity."Faith which operates in open human relations where there is an atmosphere of challenge and candor is not likely to become an "arid assent."
