Post-Christmas Reflection
God sends His Son--here lies the only remedy. It is not enough to give man a new philosophy or a better religion. A Man comes to men. Every man bears an image. His body and his life become visible. A man is not a bare word, a thought or a will. He is above all and always a man, a form, an image, a brother. And thus he does not create around him just a new way of thought, will and action, but he gives us the new image, the new form. Now in Jesus Christ this is just what has happened. The image of God has entered our midst, in the form of our fallen life, in the likeness of sinful flesh. In the teaching and acts of Christ, in His life and death, the image of God is revealed. In Him the divine image has been re-created on earth. The Incarnation, the words and acts of Jesus, His death on the cross, are all indispensable parts of that image.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Cost of Discipleship"
What Do the Fathers Say?
This food we call eucharist, and no one may receive it unless he believes that our teaching is true, and has been washed with the washing for forgiveness of sins unto regeneration, and lives as Christ handed down to us. For we do not receive these things as though they were common bread or common drink...as we have been taught they are the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.
--Justin Martyr, 100-165 AD
Jettisoning Modernity
"The Church does not exist for me; my salvation is not primarily a matter of intellectual mastery of emotional satisfaction. The church is the site where God renews and transforms us--a place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son. What I, a sinner saved by grace, need is not so much answers as reformation of my will and hear. What I describe as the practices of the church include the traditional sacramental practices of baptism and Eucharist but also the practices of Christian marriage and child-rearing, even the simple but radical practices of friendship and being called to get along with those one doesn't like! The church, for instance, is a place to learn patience by practice. The fruit of the Spirit emerges in our lives from the seeds planted by the practices of begin the church; and when the church begins to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, it becomes the witness to a postmodern world(John 17). Nothing is more countercultural than a community serving the Suffering Servant in a world devoted to consumption and violence. but the church will have this countercultural, prophetic witness only when it jettisons its own modernity; in that respect postmodernism can be another catalyst for the church to be the church."
-- James K.A. Smith
Who's Afraid of Postmodernity?
Daddy’s Shoes
Right love and faithfulness meet each other
Both peace and righteousness kiss each other
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground
Righteousness from above look down
The Lord will give what is good
And our land will give it's food
Righteous will be before him
And will set his feet on the road
-Psalm 85
It is said that Christian virtues have been divorced from each other. Righteousness, love, faithfulness, peace, have been set against each other. The one who advocates love does so at the expense of justice. For the sake of peace the assertion of right and wrong are sacrificed. Love knows nothing of faithfulness, and faithfulness has nothing to do with love.
Who hopes in the life to come? Hope in this my friend: that Right love and faithfulness will meet each other, and peace and righteousness will kiss each other. How hard it is to be faithful; in that day, faithfulness will spring from the ground!
For Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you might follow in his steps. For he committed no sin, nor was there deceit in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile back. When he suffered he did not threaten, but continually gave himself up to the one who judges the righteous. He himself took up our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to our sins and live to righteousness; by his wounds you are healed.
-I Peter 2:21- 25
There is yet one who was faithful and is faithful; him in whom all is at peace, and whose righteousness is love
On True Faith and Decision
"Faith means, not the decision to assent to a proposition, but a fundamental reorientation and redirection of life. The life of faith is the mode of existence which finds its vital source and center in God's forgiving and renewing grace. This means further that faith includes a new possibility of decision"
John Dillenberger
The Apologist’s Evening Prayer
From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle's eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
--C.S. Lewis
A Shadow of Things to Come
"All of created reality is only a flimsy shell of the being that is hidden in [God] but becomes visible in some way through the appearance of all that is visible. Every reflection will pass away on that day when God will no longer reveal himself through his reflections, but rather will plainly show forth all that he is. Once our spiritual sight is awakened and strengthened by the light of glory, then the world will no longer please us. We look beyond a shadow once the body that has cast it appears. We are no longer interested in a portrait once the actual person arrives. A mask loses its appeal when the face is uncovered. In the same way, all will seem to us mere appearance, mask and nothingness whe God will reveal himself fully to our souls."
-- Jean-Jacques Olier
Christ, a Grafted Person
In grafting we divide and open up the trunk, which will receive the graft. Now the fruit of this graft, selected by the gardener, is not the ordinary fruit of the tree to be grafted. In a similar fashion, the eternal Father whom the gospel mentions as the divine cultivator of the gospel, chose a wild plant from the earth (if we consider it in its origin and nature), which is humanity bearing the likeness of sinful flesh. God separated the nature from the person that would have been proper and connatural to it and that would have flowed out of its essence once it was actuated and existing. He substituted the heavenly graft, and the divine subsistence, the very person of his Son in the place of the human subsistence, which had been negated. Therefore this plant, divided in this way and wounded in what is most intimate, most appropriate and most connatural to its being, bears fruits that are different and do not belong to it, but rather to what was grafted onto it.
--Pierre de Berulle
Joy of Longing; True Worsip
"[C. S.] Lewis defines joy as a longing -- the pang of desire that is itself more desireable than any earthly satisfaction, almost an unhappiness of grief -- but the kind you want. Lewis' definition of joy [is] true worship -- that rare fusion of both fear and trembling and ecstasy and dancing.
"Such worship springs from grace -- our former position and our future position, realized together. And joy in relationships similarly spring from such a worship, such an already-but-not-yet approach that comes down to simple, delicious longing."
--Ben
Pray Without Ceasing
We ought always to pray is the same as saying: we must always desire eternal things, the temporal things which serve the eternal, our daily bread of every kind and for every need, life in all its fulness earthly and heavenly.
--A. G. Sertillanges
The Intellectual Life