from Margaret Avison's 'A Kind of Perseverance'

"In our culture, we do not really know or respect the moral code given in the Bible however much we may deplore the lawlessness that seems to be taking over. Alister McGrath sees lawlessness as the prison: when Christ delivers a person, it is a jail-break out of lawlessness into freedom.

It is his assumption, and mine, that it is impossible either to be bored by or to reject Jesus Christ. 'But I am bored, and I do reject Christianity,' you may think. No. You are bored by or reject some notion of what it is, put off by somebody's notion who presents a blurred picture, or by a misunderstood idea from other people's ideas. It is a Person with whom you will have to do, and He is not boring; seen clearly, He could not be rejected. Jesus is consistent with all the difficult-to-accept disciplines and commands but in a new dimension; He is, as it were, God translating Himself into the language of our kind of being, so that we can understand and, in Him, want the goodness of those disciplines and commands.

Evade Him we can, and it can seem the less dangerous course. I knew a child through all her growing-up who became a university scholar; she kept lending me books like Castaneda on peyote-visions, or various rationalists' arguments; and I read in order to keep in contact. But finally I said, 'I have been reading your books off and on for two years now. Isn't it about time you ready my Book - at least one of the Gospels in it?' Her answer, after a minute, was as honest as all her thinking: 'Margaret,' she said, 'I'm afraid to.' She is right. The greatest danger is to stop evading. Unless you consider it damaging to grow." (Avison 32)