While our church has been reading Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, I have also been reading Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Something he writes about midway through seems to speak to Bonhoeffer and Lent and a lot of what we're learning, as a church, about why "new life" is necessary.
I made the terrible mistake of entering upon the Christian life as if it were merely the natural life invested with a kind of supernatural mode by grace. I thought that all I had to do was to continue living as I had lived before, thinking and acting as I did before, with the one exception of avoiding sin. It never occurred to me that if I continued to live as I had lived before, I would be simply incapable of avoiding sin.
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