Thursday, September 16, 2010

Emerson.

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers...The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

1 comment:

Andrea said...

I reread this quote over and over, each time feeling touched and uplifted and slightly frustrated by it. I think it's so true, why is it that we practice religion as a tradition and don't have the newness of discovery of God as did our forefathers? I get frustrated when I think about the injustice of a religion being handed down, a possibly imperfect religion, corrupted by the imperfection of man, being forced upon us while we are never allowed the opportunity to see the newness of God on our own.
I think we can't just ignore the insights of those before us, but we also weren't meant to live a life without new insight from God, either.