Eucharist: do not close your eyes
For many centuries, the Church has been cultivating the bad habit of seeing this time of communion a time of introspection.
But if there is anything that is a barrier to communion, it is the self-absorption that we have come to associate with this meal. So, as you come, do not curl up into a little ball and do not think about your shortcomings. You already confessed your sins an hour ago. This is dinner; you have already washed up, some time ago.
Do not close your eyes. Look around at all the saints that are gathered here. They are the body of Christ, together with you, and when you look at them this way, you are discerning the body of Christ.
You are not to be looking at the bread, or the wine in the cup, trying to do some theological metaphysics. You are being knit together, into a perfect man, all of you together, and you are united to the head of the body, the Lord Jesus Christ. You best assume this role when you are aware of how others are doing the same.
You are serving as an eye when you gladly reflect on how others are an ear, or fingers, or a foot. When we see the diversity that exists in the unified body of Christ, you are learning true spiritual wisdom.
You will not learn this if you spend this time reflecting on what a poor eye you have been all week. That may be, but that is no reason to continue sinning in just the same way as you approach the Table. If you have been selfish during the week, confess it, and forsake it. Particularly, forsake it here.
This meal is a communal meal. It is not about you in solitary. This meal was established by the grace of God, and is therefore all about Him, and all about us together. Whenever you see your morbid individualism creeping to disrupt this meal, chase it away with loud shouts. Chase it down the road, throwing rocks at it. Then come back to the Table—come back and commune with us.
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Looking at Dawkins’ brain through Dawkins’ eyes
Reason, being a quaint and superstitious name we give to random neuron firings in the brain, wields no power at all. On atheist principles, expecting to find a correlation called “truth” between the chemical activities of the cerebral cortex in some people and the outside world is more than a little bit like astrology — or tying the bulls and bears of the stock market to the batting averages of professional baseball players. Can be done, I suppose, but why would we ever think that this random dance of atoms had anything whatever to do with that random dance of atoms?
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Modesty: the Awareness that Knowledge has a Time.
Leithart.com | Liturgical Thinking
The destruction of time meant the destruction of shame and modesty: “Shame is the soul’s garment against arbitrary and untimely knowledge: because timing is the condition in which alone the eternal may be revealed.” It takes time for a bride to know her lover, and modesty is the veil over that permits this time to occur; there is a time lag between convictions we come to and the proper time to speak, and shame is the cover for words that are not yet ready to be spoken. The Counter-Reformation again, eh claims, hardened and sterilized shame and modest: “If shame is not the expression of growth, it turns into a loveless, asocial, hard and fast thing.” But life requires being gazed upon by loving faces, since “God’s countenance cannot fasten on us unless His delegates, loving faces, are recognized as gateways to His face.”
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Evil Happens. The First Person To Make Sense Of It Wins.
Faith and Theology: Ten propositions on theodicy
The amount of nonsense I heard from Christian pulpits after the tsunami was amazing — even after I thought, decades ago, I had stopped being amazed by stupidity in the pulpit. Here is a good discussion of “the problem of evil” if you need to spend 15 minutes thinking about it yet again. And, if you have friends whom you are asking to believe God exists and He is Jesus, you do need to think about it — once. Make sure you read all the way to the bottom of the comments section.
If you read this and think ” my, my, these Christians certainly struggle with this “evil” thing” then remember that the only real alternative to theism, scientific materialism, basically says that Naziism happens because the sun exists. If you find THAT explanation more satisfying than us Christians struggling with it, your vocation lies in working with your hands and not in thinking.
Alister McGrath on Dawkins: “an embarassment to atheists”.
Dawkins, Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, is on a crusade. His salvo of outrage and ridicule is meant to rid the world of its greatest evil: religion. “If this book works as I intend,” he says, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” But he admits such a result is unlikely. “Dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads” (that’s people who believe in God) are “immune to argument”, he says.I have known Dawkins for more than 20 years; we are both Oxford professors. I believe if anyone is “immune to argument” it is him. He comes across as a dogmatic, aggressive propagandist.
Of course, back in the Sixties, everyone who mattered was telling us that religion was dead. I was an atheist then. Growing up as a Protestant in Northern Ireland, I had come to believe religion was the cause of the Province’s problems. While I loved studying the sciences at school, they were important for another reason: science disproved God. Believing in God was only for sad, mad and bad people who had yet to be enlightened by science. I went up to Oxford to study the sciences in 1971, expecting my atheism to be consolidated. In the event, my world was turned upside down. I gave up one belief, atheism, and embraced another, Christianity. Why?
C.S. Lewis: “my desire for Paradise”
..[W]e remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called ‘falling in love’ occurred in a sexless world.
from The Weight of Glory
Bland Leading the Bland
Bland Leading the Bland
Topic: Chrestomathy“The churches today are effeminate because effeminate men with wireless mikes and cardigan sweaters stroll around a platform chatting with the congregants in a nonthreatening and relational way. The churches are leaderless because we are nervous about prophetic preaching, and settle instead for bland and balanced leadership teams. The churches have no sense of the numinous because men refuse to preach the greatness and glory of the living God” (Mother Kirk, p. 75).
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