Metanoia

Oliver O'Donovan: If ethics are to be evangelical....

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If ethics are to be evangelical, they...have to speak of God at work within us, applying and confirming God's act in Christ for us.  We have to show that the redeemed creation does not merely confront us moral agents, but includes us and enables us to participate in it.

--Oliver O'Donovan in Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics

Ross Douthat: Celebration of the Passion or Self-Grooming?

"Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming." I never expected to read this in a publication like the New York Times, but Ross Douthat gave a glimpse of his own faith in a review of a recent Commonweal article by Luke Timothy Johnson.

George Herbert: Man

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Since then, my God, thou hast

So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,

That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit;

That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,

And both thy servants be.

-- George Herbert from "Man" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Figs, Bread, and Manure

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A sermon on Luke 13:1-9 preached by the Reverend Craig David Uffman at St. Anne's Church in Warsaw, Indiana on the third Sunday in Lent, 2010.

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Jean Vanier: To accept the risk of personal consciousness

 

To accept the risk of personal consciousness and growth to inner freedom can be painful; it is never easy to follow the light of oneself when others do not seem to agree.  Communities can tend to close in upon themselves.  But belonging should always be a means to personal becoming.  It is accepting the risk of dying to aggressiveness and rivalry in order to discover a new freedom and a new fecundity - a new way of giving life to others, to be in "one body" with them.

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

Wendell Berry: I Tremble with Gratitude

Cover of Leavings: Poems

I tremble with gratitude 

for my children and their children

who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead

enter and pass among us

in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

-- Wendell Berry in Leavings: Poems

George Herbert: The Collar

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I remember this from Herbert on the eve of my priesting....

I struck the board, and cry'd, No more.
  I will abroad.
 What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
 Loose as the winde, as large as store.
 Shall I be still in suit?
 Have I no harvest but a thorn
 To let me bloud, and not restore
 What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
  Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
 Before my tears did drown it.
 Is the yeare onely lost to me?
 Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
  All wasted?
 Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
  And thou hast hands.
 Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
  Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
 Good cable, to enforce and draw,
  And be thy law,
 While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
  Away; take heed:
  I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
  He that forbears
 To suit and serve his need,
  Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
  At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
  And I reply'd, My Lord.

-- George Herbert, "The Collar," in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Bishop Graham Kings: On Unity

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"If you aim at unity, you'll miss it. If you aim at mission, you'll get unity." - Bishop Graham Kings

Is Your Work Profane?

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Is your work profane?

Most of us yearn for a sense of fullness in our lives, a sense of flourishing in which two things are present. First, we’ve a sense that we’ve been delivered from those moments of confusion, melancholy, distance, and even isolation that sometimes make us feel utterly lost and alone in the wilderness. Second, in spite of the dailiness of life, we feel connected and moving towards a time in which all things are given eternal meaning, a destiny in which we rest in truth, beauty, justice, and joy.

Right now, we Christians only glimpse this our destiny in a fragmentary way, darkly, as through a mirror. But those glimpses are immensely important; they sustain us and direct us in our journey towards joy. And the name we give to such moments - and to the places and habits where we regularly encounter this fullness to which we are called - is “sacred.”  Sacred is the name for our windows to the holy. 

Fred Craddock: How to Begin Each Day

The great preacher, Fred Craddock, shared at a recent conference that, for more than thirty years, he has begun each day with the following prayer: 
 

Lord, thank you for giving me work to do that is more important than my feelings about it on any day. Amen.