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So they cannot or will not imagine the closeness to God that we hope for or the out-pouring of self that we think God offers.

HOGWASH.

Reads like more RC institutional monopolistic elitist arrogance, to me. Perhaps Amy Carmichael’s IF has not been read. Or Corrie Ten Boom’s autobiographical narratives. Even the very intellectually lofty C.S. Lewis and Frances Schaeffer offer plenty of evidence otherwise. Bill Gaithers music offers plenty of evidence otherwise. As does Dennis Jernigan’s and Fernando Ortega’s. Protestant authors offer a wealth—an abundant wealth of evidence to the contrary.

Actually, fantasizing that a concocted caricature mangling the authentic Biblical Mary thoroughly out of whack and then pretending that an inordinate focus on the caricature of her is somehow equal to a supreme closeness to God that Prottys can’t imagine . . . is . . . words almost escape me . . . outrageously . . . one of the more preposterously arrogant sounding postulations I’ve read in a long time.

. . . they are too dazzled to see those words in our language . . . .

LOL.

Dazzled? By RC words?

A weak faith leads to a weak hope.

Agreed.

Though the assumption accompanying that assertion appears to be that Prottys have said “weak” faith and RC’s faith is on the other wonderfully glorious extreme.

Cue laughing dog.

I thought that what God promises is always going to be better than the best we can imagine.

Of course! GOD IS GOD! And He promised such explicitly in His Word. I believe Him, too!

From here it looks like they have some limits on what God offers, and an anemic understanding of "we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is."

Oh, really? LOL.

Not at all. I’d wager my expansive expectations of God and His gifts to His children in eternity against any RC’s any time.

“Reads like more RC institutional monopolistic elitist arrogance, to me.”
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Correct. Much of the same is expressed when many talk about the Eucharist (the Mass). Many get all mystical sounding about it and claim some kind of superior emotion and almost spooky sounding experience when they eat the bread and then the priest drinks the hooch (Oh, excuse me, consecrated hooch). By the way, Do the people drink “His Blood,” or only the priest class.?

Many who have fallen into the modern (unbiblical) notions of sign gifts do the same when talking about “tongues” and ecstatic experiences. They get very proud of themselves for being possessed with some kind of wild fire of which the Bible says nothing, and blaming it on the Holy Ghost, become very arrogant. Why, if you haven't experienced it, your salad is short a cherry tomato. I use this as an illustration, not intending to raise yet another doctrine on this thread.

People who have walked a long Christian life in fellowship with Jesus Christ and witnessed countless direct unmanipulable answers to prayer and seen miracle after miracle, and a harvest of souls are told that they got shorted on their french fries because they don't take Rome's Mass or own a figurine of Mary holding Jesus sprawled across her lap -— (were she stand she would be 25% taller than Him).

Emotion or mystical experience become matters of only subjective analysis, and in the Lord's work it is unwise to compare ourselves among ourselves in quantities of fruit, for it is God Himself who gives the increase.