Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

There is a deliberate, almost mischievous quietness in the word "still". It admits expectation, even accusation: that Lionel Blue, a prominent Jewish voice and rabbi, ought to have outgrown or renounced Christian spaces. By framing it as an unremarkable habit, he drains the moment of scandal and turns it into something more intimate: a confession of what actually nourishes him, not what tribal etiquette permits.

Blue’s intent feels pastoral rather than polemical. He isn’t staging an interfaith manifesto; he’s describing a practice. A priory isn’t a debating society, it’s a technology for silence - ordered hours, small rooms, the disciplined unsexiness of prayer. In that sense, the line is an endorsement of spiritual craft over ideological boundary-marking. He goes there for retreats because the place is built for retreating.

The subtext is also a gentle rebuke to religious identity as performance. Blue spent a public life speaking about faith with warmth and candor, and he knew how easily piety becomes branding. "I still go" implies: I’m not doing this to be daring; I’m doing it because it works. That practicality is its own critique of sectarian anxiety.

Context matters: postwar British religious life, where Christian institutions often held the infrastructure (buildings, monasteries, retreat houses) even as belief thinned out. Blue’s line highlights a lopsided spiritual economy: Jews and others sometimes borrow Christian spaces not to convert, but because they’re among the few places left designed to help a person listen for God.