Jesus' Only Friends Are Those Who Stand At The Foot Of His Cross When All The Rest Of The World Hated Him, Wanted To Kill Him, Said He Was The Worst Villain, Like We Think Of Hitler.

I Wasted My Whole Life. Everything I did was only for myself, because I thought I was a "good" person. I didn't do it for the love of God or to give Him glory.

I went out to something called an ecumenical "pro-life" gathering. I couldn't say that the people at my church were particularly there for the love of God or to give Him glory. I noticed that our pro-life brethren of other faiths were actively hostile; they wouldn't smile, or even respond when spoken to. It was in Maidu Park (Native American grinding rocks). We "pro-lifers" each originally went out to abortion businesses, took abuse from the orange-vested "clinic escorts", were subjected to embarrassing, sexually-explicit language harassment, because we had a "good" goal, of standing in the breach, even put ourselves in harm's way, because we wanted to make a difference, to do something "good", for unborn children who had no one on their side, who would go down to death with no defenders.

Very noble sounding. But without starting by saying a prayer that we first give glory to God, not by world astounding heroism, but by the smallest intention to love God first, we were wasting our time. Such a prayer:

I don't say this because I thought it up. When I heard it, at my late stage approaching death, I was devastated, at all the span of my life that was just a waste of time.

Flannery O'Connor wrote a lot of stories with thinly veiled autobiographical self-portraits. In the one titled "Revelation", she portrays a pimply-faced girl, even named "Mary", her first name, in a Doctor's waiting room. She is a typical pseudo-intellectual college student. A mincing, "nice" lady persists in making comments, unconsciously judgmental about all the patients waiting for the Doctor. The lady ranks them each in her religious framework, and ranks some "poor white trash" as below some respectable Black people, the lady thinking of herself as an enlightened Christian. She makes the mistake of continuing to prattle on with another "nice" white lady, until the pimply college student THROWS AN ASHTRAY AT HER HEAD and calls her "a warthog from hell" before being restrained by the men in white and being taken away. The "nice" lady lies in bed at home, complaining to the Lord about how she is a good person, and protesting, "I am not a wart-hog from hell, am I Lord"

Flannery O'Connor's Revelation in a PDF online

C.S. Lewis, the Great Divorce, chapter 2.

(Denizens of hell take a day-trip to the lower reaches of heaven, where all they act out all the idiosyncrasies that sent them to hell——Sartre had in wrong in his 1944 Existentialist play "No Exit", hell isn't other people, "hell is ourselves". The blessed spirits in heaven try to persuade the helions to stay, but for one reason or another, for the reasons that originally sent them to hell, almost none of the day-trippers from hell takes up the offer to stay in heaven.)

…another passenger interrupted our conversation: but before that happened I had learned a good deal about him ("the Tousle-Headed Poet"). He appeared to be a singularly ill-used man. His parents had never appreciated him and none of the five schools at which he had been educated seemed to have made any provision for a talent and temperament such as his. To make matters worse he had been exactly the sort of boy in whose case the examination system works out with the maximum unfairness and absurdity. It was not until he reached the university that he began to recognise that all these injustices did not come by chance but were the inevitable results of our economic system. Capitalism did not merely enslave the workers, it also vitiated taste and vulgarised intellect: hence our educational system and hence the lack of "Recognition" for new genius. This discovery had made him a Communist. But when the war came along and he saw Russia in alliance with the capitalist governments, he had found himself once more isolated and had to become a conscientious objector. The indignities he suffered at this stage of his career had, he confessed, embittered him. He decided he could serve the cause best by going to America: but then America came into the war too. It was at this point that he suddenly saw Sweden as the home of a really new and radical art, but the various oppressors had given him no facilities for going to Sweden. There were money troubles. His father, who had never progressed beyond the most atrocious mental complacency and smugness of the Victorian epoch, was giving him a ludicrously inadequate allowance. And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts. Jealousy, possessiveness, was a quality he particularly disliked. She had even shown herself, at the end, to be mean about money. That was the last straw. He had jumped under a train…

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