IF you wish to save your soul and win eternal life, arise from your lethargy, make the sign of the Cross and say: In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Faith comes not through pondering but through action. Not words and speculation but experience teaches us what God is. To let in fresh air we have to open a window; to get tanned we must go
Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues exploring insights on the true self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton. Merton quotes Meister Eckhart as saying, “For God to be is to give being, and for man to be is to receive being.” [1] Our true self is a received self. At each moment, we exist to the extent we receive existence from God who is existence. Our deepest freedom rests not in our freedom
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 17, 2015 Do we cooperate in our salvation? Do our efforts make a difference? These questions lie at the heart of a centuries-old religious debate in Christianity. Classically, the Protestant reformers said, “No,” to these questions, arguing that we are saved solely and utterly by God’s grace, His unmerited favor. The Catholic Church replied that “faith without works” is dead and that faith alone is insufficient. This debate, with various
Abba Antony said: Having therefore made a beginning, and set out already on the way to virtue, let us press forward to what lies ahead. And let none turn back as Lot’s wife did, especially since the Lord said, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and turns back is fit for the Kingdom of heaven.” Now “turning back” is nothing except feeling regret and once more thinking about things of the world.
So there has grown within the rich Christian tradition the idea of integrated knowledge, which assumes the necessity of reason, but in conjunction with the other faculties and senses, such as willpower, love, and the awareness of beauty. Integrated knowledge is knowledge in faith; it combines human nature in a personal movement of encounter and communion. By this communion the fullness of the godhead is communicated to human nature, reaching the very ground of the
The monks are forever talking about the struggle that life with God demands. Life in the wilderness is a continuous combat with the demons, and it demands constant effort from the monks. Mother Synkletika said: “Those who go to God have at first struggles and many hardships. But afterward the joy is unspeakable. Just as those who wish to light a fire are first bothered by the smoke and have to cry, but in this
Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues exploring insights on the true self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton. For Merton, the spiritual life is a journey in which we discover ourselves in discovering God, and discover God in discovering our true self hidden in God. Merton writes: The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. But whatever is in God is really identical
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, May 2, 2015 Nothing about the human body is as intimate as the face. We generally think of other aspects of our bodies when we say “intimate,” but it is our face that reveals the most about us. It is the face we seek to watch in order to see what others are thinking, or even who they are. The importance of the face is emphasized repeatedly in the Scriptures. In
Without Religion the Government of a Free People Cannot Be Maintained. Americans of the twentieth century often fail to realize the supreme importance which the Founding Fathers originally attached to the role of religion in the structure of the unique civilization which they hoped would emerge as the first free people in modern times. Many Americans also fail to realize that the Founders felt the role of religion would be as important in our own
We are both person and nature, and the nature itself is also dual, being a synthesis of visible and invisible, each pervading and containing the other. Through the body, we participate in the material and living world; by means of the body, personal existence belongs to the material universe and particularizes it. Cosmic energy is constantly passing through the body, renewing it materially, with the result that the whole of humanity actually possesses a single
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