Faith supplies charity with argument and maintenance, and charity supplies faith with life and motion; faith makes charity reasonable, and charity makes faith living and effectual. . . . For to think well, or to have a good opinion, or an excellent or a fortunate understanding, entitles us not to the love of God and the consequent inheritance;
Florence Nightingale evoked very different opinions from contemporaries and later critics. The novelist Mrs. Gaskell thought her ‘completely led by God as Joan of Arc. . . . It makes one feel the livingness of God more than ever to think how straight he is sending his spirit down into her, as into the prophets and saints of old.’
As I hear of your holy conduct and irreproachable life, which is known not only to me but to the entire world as well, I greatly rejoice and exult in the Lord. . . . For, though you, more than others, could have enjoyed the magnificence and honor and dignity of the world and could have been married to the illustrious Caesar with splendor befitting you and His Excellency, you have rejected all these things and have chosen with your whole heart and soul a life of holy poverty and destitution.
“In the fourth watch of the night he came to them walking on the sea.” That is to say, Jesus has been on the way to his disciples for a long time already, long before they notice it. “But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’”
There is a great waste of power in our failure to appreciate our opportunities. ‘If I only had the gifts that this man has I would do the large and beautiful things that he does. But I never have the chance of doing such things.
The centers of intellectual and theological enquiry increasingly moved during the twelfth century to new cathedral “schools” that eventually gave birth to the great European universities. This involved a geographical shift of learning from countryside to new cities. However, the move involved more than geography.
With particular gifts as a hymn writer, Neale was responsible for English translations of many notable hymns from both the Greek and Latin traditions, as well as writing many original compositions. . . . He had a particular interest in the Eastern Church and his writings and translations of Eastern hymns helped to make Orthodox history, theology, and devotion known to Anglicans.
Transfiguration is a central theme of Christianity, the transforming of sufferings and circumstances, of men and women with the vision of Christ before them and the Holy Spirit within them. The language both of vision and of transformation is found in the Pauline, Johannine, and Petrine writings in the New Testament, and the language tells of Christian experience which recurs through the centuries.
“I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love . . .”
This Sunday School song, echoing from my earliest childhood memories, suggests a question—just how do we tell the story of the unseen? So, it’s about Jesus and his glory—but how and when have we witnessed heavenly glory?
All of us go through transitions in life. We move away, get married, have children; we get hired and fired; relationships bloom and fracture. Flexibility may be the ultimate spiritual virtue. Because if we wait until things calm down in our lives before seeking to forge a fruitful relationship with the divine, it will never happen. God’s voice and presence is everywhere, even in the midst of the chaos that so often defines our lives.