Mark, for a while I’ve had this idea on my mind and couldn’t remember if it was a quote from a book or something someone had said here or elsewhere. Between your posts here and over in the “Ard Louis” thread with @Klax, I felt I needed to put my finger on it, because it expresses my gut feeling well. I found it this evening in Austin Fisher’s book Faith in the Shadows:
Once you have glimpsed the beauty of Christ, there really is no going back. It ruins you. The story of the God-man becoming flesh, touching lepers, embracing sinners, drinking wine, preaching a coming kingdom of redemption and revelry, dying for the crimes of every last crook and priest, resurrected as a harbinger of a looming apocalypse of love—once you have heard this story, felt this story, lived this story, everything else will let you down. To truly hear the gospel is to evolve past ever being satisfied with something less. This doesn’t mean it’s true, but it does mean your moral, imaginative, and existential palate will find all else pathetically bland. Once you’ve acquired a taste for communion wine, Moscato makes you nauseous.
(Faith in the Shadows by Austin Fisher, Bookshare edition read in Calibre, location 78%.)
Unlike Fisher, I am not able to speculate, where I would eventually land, if I didn’t believe any more in an external, personal God, who revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. But I’m pretty sure, that anything less would feel like prostitution. I’m afraid Jesus ruins us for everything else.