Matthew 23:29 Meaning Woe to You

The bible teachers and the religious literalists honor the inner voice only once it has gone silent. They raise fine tombs over the prophets, meaning they take the living intuition inside the mind, the divine prompting that was meant to keep growing, and they seal it in doctrine and decoration where it can no longer speak. The institution keeps the spirit as a corpse to be admired rather than a presence to be heard. All the garnishing in the world is still a burial. What honors a dead prophet with monuments will not tolerate a living one, because a living inner voice would overturn the whole polished arrangement.

The reverence itself is the entombment, devotion turned into a stone lid over the thing it claims to love.

Tombs of the prophets: the church and its doctrines, where the living inner voice is kept sealed and dead Prophets: the divine intuition, the prompting voice within the mind Sepulchres of the righteous: the ornamented resting places built for a truth once it has been made safe and silent

It is easy to honor a prophet once he is safely dead. His words have hardened into monuments, and monuments make no demands. The living prophet was dangerous because he spoke straight to the wound people wished to hide.

So each age praises the courage of the past and turns on that same courage when it meets it in the present, wearing a new face. This is how a person protects a flattering picture of himself. By admiring goodness in the dead, he excuses himself from paying its price in his own life now.

Every living master is stoned, and every dead one is given marble. The mind can only worship what is finished, because a corpse makes no demands; it will not disturb the arrangement of one's life, it can be visited on holidays and left there.

A prophet while alive is a wound in a sleeping town, since his presence makes the ordinary way of living suddenly visible as a way of living. Kill him and the danger is over; then he can be praised, quoted, carved in stone, and the man polishing his tomb feels himself religious without ever having risked a single moment of waking up.