“I should be doing more,” she said. “I want to do more but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what God wants me to do. What is God’s will for my life?” That’s how our conversation began. Her questions and statements are more than familiar to me. I have heard them or variations of them many times before. I have asked and … Continue reading Called to Become God: The Human Vocation
“The Lord clothes his chosen souls in the garments of the ineffable light of his kingdom, the garments of faith, hope, love, joy, and peace, the garments of goodness and kindness and all comparable things. They are the divine garments pulsating with light and life, and they bring us peace that passes all description; for God is himself Love and Joy and Peace and Kindness … Continue reading Clothes Really Do Make the Man, and the Woman
The saying “Know yourself” means therefore that we should recognize and acknowledge in ourselves the God who made us in his own image, for if we do this, we in turn will be recognized and acknowledged by our Maker. So let us not be at enmity with ourselves, but change our way of life without delay. “For Christ who is God, exalted above all creation,” … Continue reading Claiming Our Share in His Divinity
You have united, O Lord, your divinity with our humanity and our humanity with your divinity; your life with our mortality and our mortality with your life. You have assumed what is ours, and you have given us what is yours, for the life and salvation of our souls. To you, O Lord, be glory forever. – From the Maronite Eucharistic liturgy Continue reading For the Life and Salvation of our Souls
If you seek after God with all your heart and all your strength, then the virtues of your soul and body will turn you into a mirror of the image of God within. You will be so merged in God, and God so merged in you, that each will endlessly repose in the other. Such are the riches of the gifts of the Spirit that … Continue reading Becoming an Icon of Divine Blessedness
The collect and readings for the Feast of the Transfiguration may be found here. The following sermon is based on Luke 9:28-36. Most of us, I suspect, at some point each day, look in a mirror. We check our hair, our makeup, our teeth, our clothes. Mirrors show us what we look like. While it might be important to know what we look like, it’s … Continue reading Behold What Your Are, Become What You See – A Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration, Luke 9:28-36
I suspect that many parishes, priests, and lay persons may not consider spiritual formation as a means of or opportunity for outreach. Instead, parish outreach tends to focus on corporal needs such as hunger, homelessness, poverty, health care, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and issues of justice. This most certainly must continue. It was a part of Jesus’ earthly life, a concern of the early … Continue reading Spiritual Formation – The Missional Challenge and Future of the Church
How could the human race go to God if God had not come to us? How should we free ourselves from our birth into death if we had not been born again according to faith by a new birth generously given by God, thanks to that which came about from the Virgin’s womb? – Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, IV.33.4. This is the reason why … Continue reading Irenaeus and the Purpose of the Incarnation
William Porcher DuBose (April 11, 1836 to August 18, 1918) was an American Anglican priest and theologian. He spent most of his life as a professor at the School of Theology, The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. In the Episcopal Church he is remembered on August 18. He was one of the most original and creative thinkers in the American Episcopal Church and … Continue reading WIlliam Porcher DuBose, Episcopal Theologian
The Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated on a fixed date, August 6. The transfiguration of Jesus is a visible image of theosis. In his homily on the transfiguration St. John of Damascus says, “What was human became divine, and what was divine human by mode of exchange and unconfused mutual coinherence and the strictest hypostatic union.” Jesus did not, however, become something new, something he … Continue reading The Feast of the Transfiguration
