What did the contemporaries of the early martyrs think about the events of their time? Perhaps the complexity of the factors in an historical situation, their own closeness to the events, and even their lack of personal courage prevented them from seeing the significance of occurrences that today seem so clearly to have been heroic testimonies to faith in the Lord.
On Sunday, October 6, 1878, a little more than six months after Oakerhater’s release from Fort Marion, Making Medicine and the other three Indian students received Christian Baptism. The service was held at Grace Church in Syracuse, New York. Bishop Frederic D. Huntington conducted the services.
Here we have two rich biblical themes—messiahship and discipleship. Here we have also two illustrations of the human tendency to try to redefine the meaning of biblical teachings to make them more palatable, thereby distorting or corrupting them. But something else is also illustrated here. We can see at work here two fundamental moral impulses that are part of our essential God-given human nature. . . .
The end of Benedictine spirituality is to develop a transparent personality. Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed.
The first recommendation tonight is: don’t let us waste much time gazing at ourselves. A deepened and enriched sense of God is far more important than increased and detailed knowledge of the self. God, our redeemer and sustainer, is all and does all, and is the one Reality. Life comes with such thoughts. Plunging more deeply in him with faith and love will do more than self-concerned efforts. We can do nothing of ourselves but depress ourselves and get fussy.
Augustine of Hippo’s On Patience. . . confines itself to two questions: where does Christian patience come from and what is its character? . . . Augustine argues that patience has but a single source, the free and unmerited grace of God, and defines patience as that which helps us “endure evils with equanimity so as not to abandon, through a lack of equanimity, the good through which we arrive at the better.”
I remember very vividly the first time that I ever saw Dr. Gallaudet. I was a candidate for Holy Orders. I do not want to say anything to give anybody pain–certainly not a priest of the Church, whose office it is to minister in the City of New York; but I was wandering about the streets of New York on a summer day–it was in August, I remember–to find, if I might, a church that was open on a Sunday afternoon in August.
John of the Cross speaks to people who feel unable to change. We may have sensed in our lives a call to freedom, to wholeness, to more than what we are now. John felt this as a call to reach out for God. But within us, an unvoiced fear can make change impossible. It is the fear that when we reach, we may not find. It begs the question: If I give myself, will God fill me in my life?
The remarkable characteristic of Bartholomew is his low profile. We cannot even be sure who he was. Early sources suggest his full name was Nathanael bar (son of ) Tolmai—later, Bartholomew—the Nathanael who was the friend of Philip and who questioned, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46).
What saddens me these days is how many Christians I meet who identify themselves as “heretics”—jokingly if they are still in churches and defiantly if they are not. For some, the issue is that they believe less than they think they should about Jesus.