Community life offers more blessings than can be fully and easily enumerated. It is more advantageous than the solitary life both for preserving the goods bestowed on us by God and for warding off the external attacks of the Enemy.
Returning from the nursing home, I feel empty.
She who nurtured me no longer knows me.
Suddenly, I need to be taken care of.
The unkempt homeless man on the steps of the church invites me in.
“The food here is good,” he says.
The irony in Enmegahbowh’s name is evident in his life and ministry. Born Ojibwa, and reborn a Christian by baptism, he was a man of two peoples. To be “the man who stands by his people” meant, in his case, to be forever in the middle ground between two peoples.
Greetings, sons and daughters, in the name of the Lord who loved us, in peace. so great and abundant are the righteous acts of God toward you that I am exceedingly overjoyed, beyond measure, by our blessed and glorious spirits.
Glorious is the Wise One Who allied and joined
Divinity with humanity,
one from the height and the other from the depth.
He mingled the natures like pigments
and an image came into being: the God-man.
Delightful it would be
From a rock pinnacle to trace
Continually
The Ocean’s face:
That I might watch the heaving waves
Of noble force
To God the Father chant their staves
Of the earth’s course.
One of the things that will become increasingly obvious when we study the apostles is that Jesus did not wait for people to be perfect in order to call them into the circle of God’s love. It is important theologically where you place perfection in the great saga of our experience. If perfection were something we had to have before God would accept and help us, then there would be no hope for any of us.
A brother said to a hermit, “How does the fear of God come into the soul?” He said, “If there is humility and poverty, and no judgment of others, the fear of God will be present there.”
O Lord, bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part of the whole.
To his friend in loving embrace, to his brother in the bonds of the Spirit, to Archbishop Egbert, invested with the insignia of the highest office, many greetings and unfailing love in Christ, from Bonifice, a lowly bishop, legate in Germany of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.