When you preach the Gospel to sated and satisfied people, they don’t understand it. They distort and misuse it for their own ego-centered purposes, their own control purposes, their own religious purposes, whatever their intent may be. They have not yet been initiated into giving up control, which we now find is at the heart of all traditional initiation rites. The Gospel, in short, has to be preached to people like Job. They are the only ones who can hear it and not rearrange it for their own purposes. The Jobs of history have been initiated into the essential human paradox: We learn by
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