Again, we pray and pray, and no answer comes. The boon does not arrive. Why? Perhaps we are not spiritually ready for it. It would not be a real blessing. But the persistence, the importunity of faith, is having a great effect on our spiritual nature. It ripens.
A reading from Vida Dutton Scudder, the daughter of a Congregational missionary India who found in the Anglo-Catholicism of the Episcopal Church a vision of the world that offered hope. She wrote, “Social intercession may be the mightiest force in the world.”
O send thy light and thy truth, that we may live always near to thee, our God. Let us feel thy love, that we may be as it were already in heaven, that we may do all our work as the angels do theirs.
Our tradition has always been that the author of the third gospel and Acts is “Luke, the beloved physician.” This title comes, however, from a letter written by one of Paul’s disciples to the Colossians (Col. 4:14). The tradition is appropriate and—though we can never prove it—it may even be true.
I am writing letters to all the churches, to assure them that I am dying for God of my own free will–that is, if you don’t interfere. Please, please don’t make a misguided attempt to do me a kindness. Let me be fodder for the wild beasts–that’s how I can come to God.
If you will build a glorious church unto God, see first yourselves to be in charity with your neighbours, and suffer not them to be offended by your works. Then, when ye come into your parish-church, you bring with you the holy temple of God;
Teresa of Avila taught us to pay attention to the potential of our humanity and to the process of growing into the fulfillment of our baptismal promises. Openness to God’s spirit at work in our lives can lead to the transformation of our desires.
The soul that truly loves God loves all good, seeks all good, protects all good, praises all good, joins itself to good people, helps and defends them, and embraces all the virtues: it only loves what is true and worth loving.
You know that God is everywhere, which is a great truth; wherever God dwells there is heaven, and you may feel sure that all which is glorious is near His Majesty.
The range and variety of intermediary functions of the deacon have been emphasized in recent studies of diakonia. Ormonde Plater, for example, notes that in the liturgy the deacon “embodies two symbols, servant and angel” and recalls from the New Testament the image of the four living creatures guarding the altar of heavenly liturgy, as seen in Revelation 4.