Something I read this morning

"Human beings are ambivalent toward holiness. We are drawn toward those qualities exemplified by a St. Francis or by Mother Teresa, or by communities who witness to the gospel under severe persecution. Yet we find such qualities disturbing, too far removed from the way we must live our daily lives. Something deep within our existence creates a restlessness for God, yet we live and move and work in a culture of technology, efficiency, and the tyranny of the literal. The hunger for holiness coexists uneasily with the practical atheism [italics mine] of our way of life. Still, the deepest language of the Christian biblical tradition claims that the created world itself already reflects the goodness of God but also groans in travail for sanctification and recreation. The time and place where these tensions intersect is the gathered church at worship." ('Sanctifying Time, Place, and People' by Don E. Saliers; taken from A Guide to Prayer...).