In school I found the subject of history overwhelming - there was so much of it! A lot of it seemed pretty boring... wars, wars, and more wars!
But the older I get, the more interesting history is to me! One of my personal goals is to get a sense of the history of the Christian church. How has religious thought changed over the past 2000 years? (Right now I'm focusing on the church in Europe, but hopefully I'll eventually move on to other branches of Christianity as well. I'd like to learn more about the history of the Orthodox church, for example, and Christianity in India, Egypt and Ethiopia.)
But for the time being, I am nibbling away at books from various periods in Europe's two thousand year church history. One that I'm now reading was written in Britain at the time of Chaucer - an anonymously written text called The Cloud of Unknowing.
I'm surprised at how readable this 600-year-old "classic" is: "Continue doing what's right. Be strong. Look forward and let go of what happened yesterday... God...is not asking for your help. He is asking for you. He wants you to lock your eyes on him and leave him alone to work in you..."
Nothing old-fashioned here! It could have been written yesterday or today.
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