Commemoration of Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, 1095 There are a number of Hebrew words about salvation which also mean read more

Commemoration of Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, 1095 There are a number of Hebrew words about salvation which also mean "to bring into a spacious environment", "to be at one's ease", "to be free to develop". "Salvation" can be seen then as the new life in Christ, in which we are to be "free to develop" into Christ-like people. For this maturing to take place, there needs to be a breaking down of barriers, a breaking up of the soil of our personalities, and a healing of inner wounds and hurts. The soil is softened, the clay becomes malleable through the experience of the tender love of God and the accepting, non-judgmental love of Christians. We cannot be beaten into shape.

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: I have called my material surroundings a stage set. In this I can read more

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: I have called my material surroundings a stage set. In this I can act. And you may well say "act". For what I call "myself" (for all practical, everyday purposes) is also a dramatic construction; memories, glimpses in the shavinglass, and snatches of the very fallible activity called "introspection", are the principal ingredients. Normally I call this construction "me"' and the stage set "the real world". Now the moment of prayer is for me -- or involves for me as its condition -- the awareness, the reawakened awareness, that this "real world" and "real self" are very far from being rock-bottom realities. I cannot, in the flesh, leave the stage, either to go behind the scenes or to take my seat in the pit; but I can remember that these regions exist. And I also remember that my apparent self -- this clown or hero or super -- under his grease-paint is a real person with an off-stage life. The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real person: unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but -- what shall I call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge, the performance?

Pray Him to give you what the Scriptures call "an honest and good heart," or "a perfect heart;" and, without read more

Pray Him to give you what the Scriptures call "an honest and good heart," or "a perfect heart;" and, without waiting, begin at once to obey Him with the best heart you have. Any obedience is better than none. You have to seek His face; obedience is the only way of seeing Him. All your duties are obediences. To do what He bids is to obey Him, and to obey Him is to approach Him. Every act of obedience is an approach -- an approach to Him who is not far off, though He seems so, but close behind this visible screen of things hiding Him from us.

Christmas Eve The soft light from a stable door Lies on the midnight lands; The wise men's star burns read more

Christmas Eve The soft light from a stable door Lies on the midnight lands; The wise men's star burns evermore, Over all the desert sands. Unto all peoples of the earth A little Child brought light; And never in the darkest place Can it be utter night. No flickering torch, no wavering fire, But Light the Life of men; Whatever clouds may veil the sky, Never is night again.

I believe that pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can engage in. read more

I believe that pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can engage in. To afford sympathetic entertainment to abstract ideas, to let one idea beget another, and that another, till the mind teems with them; to compare one idea with others, to weigh, to consider, evaluate, approve, respect, correct, refine; to join thought with thought like an architect till a whole edifice has been created within the mind; to travel back in imagination to the beginning of the creation and then to leap swiftly forward to the end of time; to bound upward through illimitable space and downward into the nucleus of an atom; and all this without so much as moving from our chair or opening the eyes--this is to soar above all the lower creation and come near to the angels of God.

Feast of Mary Magdalen, Apostle to the Apostles The more vigor you need, the more gentleness and kindness you read more

Feast of Mary Magdalen, Apostle to the Apostles The more vigor you need, the more gentleness and kindness you must combine with it. All stiff, harsh goodness is contrary to Jesus.

The doctrine of the blessed Trinity is a reminder of the supernaturalness of biblical Christianity. The doctrine defies rationalization, yet read more

The doctrine of the blessed Trinity is a reminder of the supernaturalness of biblical Christianity. The doctrine defies rationalization, yet it provides for the believer the answer to the unity and diversity of the world.

We religious leaders need to look very much more deeply. We can so easily have talks with people, and they read more

We religious leaders need to look very much more deeply. We can so easily have talks with people, and they can say we have helped, write us grateful letters, even stand steady for a time till the juice we have put into them runs out; but, we may have brought them no hunger for God -- because that hunger is no ache in our own heart -- nor brought them anywhere near to the end of self. ... The Notebooks of Florence Allshorn September 13, 1999 Feast of John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, Teacher, 407 Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up in life. These are words by which the slanderers of the nature, of the body, the impeachers of our flesh, are completely overthrown... We do not wish to cast aside the body, but corruption: not the flesh, but death. The body is one thing, corruption another; the body is one thing, death another... What is foreign to us is not the body but corruptibility.

Feast of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, & his sister Macrina, Teachers, c.394 & c.379 Humility is the root, mother, read more

Feast of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, & his sister Macrina, Teachers, c.394 & c.379 Humility is the root, mother, nurse, foundation, and bond of all virtue.