An analogy: You are responsible for fifty teenagers. So you gather them together and put them in the parish hall and tell them to dance. You go for a cup of coffee. You return and witness this scene, a typical one: four or five girls dancing in the middle of the hall, and all the guys hugging the walls.

Well, that’s a pathetic, but, I think, fairly accurate image of the Church. At the heart of the Church there are a few live ones–the saints on earth–participating, doing the Christ dance, re-enacting the mystery of faith, the birth-death-resurrection of the Everlasting man.

The rest of us are hugging the walls, cuddling up to the institution and the structure, smugly and securely “doing our thing” on the threshold of the Church; and from that safe distance we watch and discuss the action at the center of the Church.”

from The Human Adventure: The Art of Contemplative Living