A Return to Blogging

The past month has certainly been an eventful one. I wasn't able, unfortunately, to make time for blogging during my two-week vacation in Ireland (6-20 August 2010), during which I saw some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen in a very long time. The week after that was kept busy with preparations for a lengthy journey to seminary. Now that I've completed the New Student Orientation process and made plenty of new friends, I hope to blog more regularly. Especially because I can tell from the atmosphere here that this seminary will be a very healthy spiritual atmosphere.

I became most convinced of this during the several chapel services I attended during orientation. This is because of one thing above all else: the Spirit of the Lord is mightily present in the worship of this community. I could scarcely even hope to worthily articulate what I mean to express. Suffice it to say, nevertheless, that at the very first such chapel service (on 2 September 2010), as we -- a crowd of passionately God-fearing Christians drawn from all nations -- sang with one voice and one heart the praises of our God, the Holy Spirit was there. There in power and love. Present to me in a way that I haven't experienced him in the past four years. Present as tangibly as the air that fills my lungs. Present to receive from us the worship that we offered passionately in song and in proclamation. Present to welcome, to invite, to convict, and to grant grace. I, for one, was moved to tears and a trembling voice -- an exceptionally rare experience for me. And the next day, too, did God accept our worship and make himself known, not only as we sang together with uplifted hands but also as we broke bread together and as we prayed together. There is scarcely anything so moving as the presence of the Spirit as hundreds and hundreds of faithful followers of the Lord Jesus Christ gather together around a cross to pray in unison the Lord's Prayer.

Throughout the whole experience over those two days, my mind was simply bombarded with ideas and inspiration. It's my hope that, despite my failing memory for anything not found in a book, I can eventually recover even half of those thoughts in order to expound upon them further, both for my own reflection and perhaps for the use of anyone who might stumble across what I write.

Until then, God bless you all.

We Believe...

I'm not really feeling up to any exceptionally deep posts today - feeling sort of down at the moment - but since it's been a while since my last post, I figure it can't hurt to put something new up. What I've decided to post is simply the Nicene Creed (as revised at the First Council of Constantinople in AD 381):

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, visible and invisible.

And [we believe] in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and he rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.

And [we believe] in one holy, universal, and apostolic church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Amen.

This is perhaps the single document that, more than any other outside of the Bible itself, has united Christians ever since. It is truly the ecumenical creed, the declaration that can be voiced equally by Protestant Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, and Eastern Orthodox Christians. (Well, actually, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have inherited a slightly amended version that Eastern Orthodoxy can't quite accept, and that division is highly unfortunate.)

This is the creed. Whenever I read its words, I feel a warmth inside that cries out, "Oh holy truth!" This is the faith received by the church for well over 1500 years. One God who created all other things. The Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The eternal relations within the Trinity. The incarnation. The virgin birth. The atonement and crucifixion. The resurrection of Christ. His ascension into heaven. His present position of authority, honor, and glory. His future return. The judgment. The resurrection of the dead. Everlasting life for the believer. The ultimate unity of Christ's people. Baptism, the sign of entrance into Christ's community. All sketched in brief, but all potently present in these words.

To me, it's beautiful. This is the ancient symbol that marked off those who submitted themselves to the apostles' teaching from those who wandered in error or unbelief. It wasn't the first such statement - one can compare it to the briefer 'rules of faith' mentioned by some of the earlier Church Fathers - but this is the one that was inherited, as this, by the entire church. The heart of Christian teaching.

Embrace it. Enter it. Live it.

Sounding the Depths of God's Love

Yesterday after a Bible study at my alma mater, a few friends of mine and I stayed around for a bit to sing some classic hymns together. One of the ones we selected - a beautiful one indeed - was Charles Wesley's hymn "And Can It Be That I Should Gain?" Now, I don't have any great insights or anything (do I ever?), but I did find much charm in the second verse, which begins with the lines:

'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies!
Who can explore his strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
To sound the depths of love divine.

I really love that verse. First of all, it opens up with a proclamation of one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith. By "mystery", of course, we don't generally mean something contrary to reason, or anything like that. What we mean is a great and very sacred thing that, once hidden from the world and very dimly accessible at best to the comparatively dim light of human reasoning capabilities, is now openly shown to all who will receive it through the revelation of Jesus Christ in the new covenant. (This is likewise the proper sense in which the doctrine of the Trinity should be held to be a "mystery".) What mystery is this, then? "Th' Immortal dies!" Those words bring back to mind so many paradoxes from the discourses of Melito, second-century bishop of Sardis:

What new mystery, then, is this?
The Judge is judged, and holds his peace.
The Invisible One is seen, and is not ashamed.
The Incomprehensible is laid hold upon, and is not indignant.
The Illimitable is circumscribed, and does not resist.
The Impassible suffers, and does not avenge.
The Immortal dies, and answers not a word.
The Celestial is laid in the grave, and endures!
What new mystery is this?

Needless to say, it's no wonder that Melito was held in the early church to be a very passionate and skilled preacher. But as Melito and Charles Wesley saw, it truly is a mystery that Jesus Christ, who by all rights of his divinity had better claim to pure deathlessness, would have died - and done so for us. (Of course, as Christians thought through the implications of the incarnation, they realized that we should say that Jesus Christ died by virtue of his human nature, but not by virtue of his divine nature, and yet that it is the person Jesus Christ, both fully divine and fully human, who truly died.) The Immortal One died for us - and "who can explore his strange design?" Why would he do this? Of course, we know the answer, but who can truly understand it? We may apprehend God's love, but who can comprehend it? Who can appreciate the depths of it fully?

The next two lines answer rather negatively. "In vain the firstborn seraph tries / To sound the depths of love divine". The seraphim - six-winged fiery angels - are perhaps among the most glorious created beings; Isaiah 6 depicts the seraphim perpetually flying around God's throne and proclaiming his holiness, and I think it safe to say that on each flight, they discover something new about God. And yet even the firstborn seraph - the oldest created being who's spent the most time in God's intimate presence, forever learning about God through ages past - would try in vain to "sound the depths of love divine". Even that firstborn seraph, we sing with Wesley, cannot reach the bottomless depths of God's love. The phrase "sound the depths" derives from the old practice of using a plumb line to measure the depth of water; even this firstborn seraph would be helpless to, with all his might, sink a weight to the bottom of God's love. It's bottomless; there can be no sounding the depths of God's love.

And that's the beauty. The self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ shows us that God's very nature and eternal being are characterized by love; and it shows us that, though we're to live eternally, we will never, ever reach the point at which we can rightly say, "Well, we've at last got God's love figured out now. Turns out he loves us exactly yea much and no more. Glad that's finally settled." By no means! We, like the firstborn seraph, will never reach that point; there is no such point. God's love is endless, and we will be forever lost in it - or, phrased better yet, forever found in it. Just as the seraphim endlessly cry "Holy, holy, holy" with the freshness of infinite discovery, so too might we rightly spend all of eternity by crying out - with ever-increasing excitement and freshness and newness:

"Loving, Loving, Loving is Yahweh, the God of Hosts!
Heaven and earth are awash in his endless glory."

On Life-Giving Faith

Today I was stumbling around on the Internet looking at classic Christian writings - you know, the usual - when I happened upon a line that really struck me. It came from a series of sermons by Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril was a pretty interesting guy. He was the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt from 412 to 444. One thing he's mostly known for is his feud with the bishop of Constantinople, a heretic named Nestorius who was eventually deposed at the Council of Ephesus in 431. But that's neither here nor there. Cyril also did a lot of writing and preaching, and we actually still have some of his sermons. And it's while reading some of his sermons on the Gospel of Luke that I found something cool.

Sermon #46 dealt with the story of how Jesus raised a little girl from the dead. And in that story, the girl's dad had come to Jesus in deep distress because his daughter was fading fast. And as he and Jesus got close to the house, someone came out and told him not to bother, because the girl was dead now, and so there was no point in troubling Jesus since there was no longer anything he could do to help. And yea, verily, Jesus saith unto him, "Pssh! Just you watch!" ...Alright, so that might be from Today's Lamely Paraphrased Version. What Jesus actually said was, "Fear not. Only believe, and she will live." And because they trusted him, he raised the girl from the dead.

That line, "Only believe and she will live", really captured Cyril's attention. And what he said captured mine. Cyril concluded his message by saying:

Faith, then, in every way, is the cause of life, as that which slays sin, the mother and nurse of death. Excellently, therefore, said Christ to the ruler of the synagogue of the Jews, when his daughter was dead: "Fear not; only believe, and she shall live." For, as I said, Christ makes those live who approach him by faith, in that he is life: "for in him we live and move, and are" [Acts 17:28]; and he will raise the dead "suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump" [1 Corinthians 15:52], as it is written. And having this hope in him, we shall both attain to the city that is above, and reign as kings with him, by whom and with whom, to God the Father be praise and dominion, with the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen.

I really love all of that. But it's the first sentence of the paragraph that gripped me. "Faith is in every way the cause of life, as that which slays sin, the mother and nurse of death". First of all, it really struck me that Cyril described sin as "the mother and nurse of death". I think it really captures what James was getting at when he said that "sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death" (James 1:15). Why is sin so dangerous, so problematic? Because it gives birth to death. It's death's mom, death's nurse. You can't cling to sin and escape its offspring. Sin lays its eggs in you. Those little vices we like to cling to? They hatch and destroy us. As much as we may cherish them, they bring destruction. No good ultimately comes from them. Like I quoted C. S. Lewis saying a while back, "In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

But where sin gives birth to death, faith gives birth to life. Like Jesus said, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they might have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10). Abundant life. Rich life. True life, pure life, vibrant life, flourishing life. That's what Jesus promises through faith in him. Jesus didn't come to squelch our fun. Jesus didn't come to turn our lives into dreary, puritanical gloom. Jesus came to give us a life we can truly cherish, a life of deep joy - not only now, but in the age to come. And what he asks is for us to trust him to deliver on that promise. That's what faith is: trust and loyalty. Because God is the God of love and life, we need to stick close to him if we want to experience the deepest depths of love and life, not only now, but also in the age to come. Because God is our Creator and our Redeemer, we need to trust that he knows what's best for us and how we're supposed to work - and that's why we follow what sometimes seem like some odd "rules": because they're guidelines to proper human functioning and flourishing, and while it might not always be fun and games in the present while we're still readjusting and growing into this new pattern of life, in the end we know that this new pattern of life will be so much fuller than what we once had. And because Jesus is who he is, we need to trust in him to have the love and the power to deliver on that promise.

That's what faith is all about. And that's why faith gives life: because the faith of which we speak is faith in Jesus, who promises to set us free from death and deliver us into abundant life. By slaying our captor (sin), which wanted to be our executioner from the inside out, faith in Jesus sets us free to, like Cyril says, "attain to the city that is above and reign as kings with [Jesus]". From death into glorious life.

O Lord, may I learn to have the faith in you that will put sin to death and free me to enter into the rich glory you've promised for your people. Let sin, the mother and nurse of death, be slain in me; let faith give birth in me to a thousand treasures of fullness in its place. To you, O ever-faithful and life-giving Lord, be all glory and praise, both now and forever. Amen.

On Glorying in the Cross

So this morning I was looking around in Thomas Aquinas' biblical commentaries to see if I'd find anything cool. Last night I was at a hymnsing, and we sang the awesome hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" by Isaac Watts, with the famous second stanza:

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

I've always found that to be really deep and moving, and anyway the hymnal listed Galatians 6:14 ("May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world") as a Scripture reference, so those of us at the hymnsing spent a bit of time talking about the verse. And like I said, this morning I was looking through Aquinas' commentaries and I decided to check out what he had to say about the verse. And lemme tell you, when I got to his comments on it in his fourth lecture on Galatians 6... to say I was moved wouldn't do it justice. Here, read for yourself:

Notice that where the worldly philosopher felt shame, there the Apostle found his treasure; what the former regarded as foolish became for the Apostle wisdom and glory, as Augustine says. For each person glories in that through which he is considered great. Thus a person who regards himself as great in his riches, glories in them; and so on for other things. For one who regards himself to be great in nothing but Christ glories in Christ alone. But the Apostle was such a one; hence he says, "I live now not I, but Christ lives in me" [Galatians 2:20].

Accordingly he glories in nothing but Christ and particularly in the Cross of Christ, and this because in it are found all the things about which men usually glory. For some glory in the friendship of the great, such as of kings and princes; and this friendship the Apostle found most of all in the Cross, because there an obvious sign of divine friendship is shown: "But God commends his charity towards us, because when as yet we were sinners according to the time, Christ died for us" [Romans 5:8]. For nothing shows his mercy to us as much as the death of Christ. Hence Gregory: "O inestimable love of charity! To redeem the servant, he delivered his Son."

Again, some glory in knowledge; and of this the Apostle found a more excellent one in the Cross: "For I judged not myself to know anything among you but Jesus Christ and him crucified" [1 Corinthians 2:2], for in the Cross is the perfection of all law and the whole art of living well. Again, some glory in power; and of this the Apostle found the highest form through the Cross: "The word of the cross to them, indeed, that perish is foolishness; but to them that are saved, that is, to us, it is the power of God" [1 Corinthians 1:18]. Again, some glory in newly-found freedom; and this the Apostle obtained through the Cross: "Our old man is crucified with him that the body of sin may be destroyed, to the end that we may serve sin no longer" [Romans 6:6].

Again, some glory into being accepted into some famous fellowship; but by the Cross of Christ, we are accepted into the heavenly ranks: "Making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth and the things that are in heaven" [Colossians 1:20]. Again, some glory in the triumphal banners of conquest; but the Cross is the triumphal ensign of Christ's conquest over the demons: "And despoiling the principalities and powers, he has exposed them confidently in open show, triumphing over them in himself" [Colossians 2:15]; "Blessed be the wood by which justice comes" [Wisdom 14:7].

...Wow. I never really thought this deeply about just the first portion of that one verse, but it's amazing how much it can hold! Think about it: anything I could possibly justifiably boast in, I'll find more of it in the crucified and risen Christ than I ever could apart from him.

Are connections in high places the sort of thing I'd be likely to boast about? Why sell out to the world, when by being a Christian I have a direct hotline to the omnipotent God, and in fact have been given the indwelling Spirit of sonship?

How about prestigious club membership? In Christ I'm part of the communion of saints and am destined to have intimate fellowship with the cherubim and seraphim; what country club can compete with that?

What about triumphant victory? Christ beat the tar out of the powers of darkness, both on the cross and in his resurrection, and he shares that victory with us! It may be lost on me under this mortal veil of darkness, but the victory that I can personally claim through Christ makes all the conquests of Alexander the Great look like a mere pittance.

How about liberty and freedom? Some people might boast in being free and unoppressed in this human realm; that was probably far more the case in Paul's day, when slavery was yet endemic and a slave who bought his freedom really could have something to boast about. But how tiny that seems next to the idea of being set free from sin!

Or what about knowledge? Some people - that'd be me, folks - are inclined to boast in having a lot of knowledge about this or that. And those truly are good things, gifts of God... but may I never lose sight of the fact that not only do I have those treasures of earthly knowledge, but in Christ I additionally have knowledge of sacred mysteries revealed to the people of God, mysteries unattainable by my human faculties apart from grace. And that knowledge of those mysteries - mysteries like the fact that God's very nature is self-giving love, that God's character is cruciform - is so much greater than, say, verifying the existence of the Higgs boson or cataloguing the lost works from the Library of Alexandria or solving Fermat's Last Theorem or resolving the ontological status of mathematical objects. (And trust me that all of those things would be pretty cool achievements.)

Or what about wealth? There are a lot of people who could boast about that. But in Christ are all the unsearchable riches of God! How idiotic would I be to gain the wealth of all the universe and miss out on the vastly greater treasure and even lose my soul?

So if I know all this, why am I so tempted to boast in everything else? In all my natural capacities and gifts, in my connections, in my accomplishments... why am I so tempted to make such a huge fuss about myself and my works, and so little fuss about Jesus Christ and him crucified? Like Thomas Aquinas goes on to say, "a person who glories in something treasures it and desires to make it known".

O Lord, may I - like your servant Paul - learn to glory first and foremost in nothing but you and your cross, so that I may treasure your sacrifice above all else and above all else yearn with an undying passion to declare it to all people. Amen.

Thoughts on Worship and Hell

Lately I've been reading a lot of essays by C. S. Lewis, collected in a neat volume called God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. See, the interesting thing is that C. S. Lewis is such a popular Christian author even today, and so many of his books are total classics; but up until this past fall, when I tackled my copy of The C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, I never read his stuff. A few years earlier, I got a few pages into The Screwtape Letters and found myself bored. But this time around, I've developed my endurance quite a bit since then, and I loved it - although Lewis and I would never have seen even close to eye-to-eye on the philosophy of time. So anyway, now I'm working on God in the Dock, and as I was finishing up one of the essays, I came across a very striking passage:

Be sure there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God's power to prevent your being eternally miserable. While that something remains there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. (God in the Dock, pp. 154-155)

The last sentence there really struck me most of all. When we worship and obey God, we don't do it for him in the sense that we're supplying a need in him, something he's lacking that we can offer. He doesn't gain anything from our worship. God is completely self-sufficient in himself. He didn't need to create, and he doesn't gain anything new in himself by doing so. We worship God, not for his gain, but because it's the right thing to do. This is one reason why worship should never be based on feeling or emotion, although those can be (but aren't always) byproducts of worship. I worship God because it's simply right to do so, because of who he is. But on another level, in worshipping and obeying God, I do benefit myself. And no, that doesn't make it self-serving, because that benefit isn't the reason why I do any of it - or, at least, it ought not be. But I benefit myself because it's what I was made to do. I was created by God to be a God-worshipping being. Like Thomas Aquinas said, God is the proper end of man - and that's "end" in the sense of "goal", not in the sense of "conclusion". And in fulfilling my purpose, in fulfilling the function for which I was made, I gain the greatest benefit of all: complete and utter fulfillment. The way I get it now is, of course, just a shadow of what's to come; my worship of God in the present is an imperfect, shadowy reflection of the worship I'll be able to give him when all's said and done, when God makes all things new.

Some people say, "You are what you eat." But far truer than that is, "You become like what you worship." We were made in the image of God, and our destiny is to be more perfectly conformed to the true image, Christ. This is why idolatry is so dangerous. When we worship the living God, we become more greatly conformed to the ultimate source of all Life, all Love, and all Truth. And so, when we set aside all our defenses and really let God transform us as we worship him, we become increasingly like that source. But when we worship what isn't God, when we 'exchange the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve created things rather than the Creator' (cf. Romans 1:25), what we're being conformed to is at best a shadow, not the real thing. If I devote myself to something that's at best a copy, I'll always have that thing standing as an obstacle between myself and the reality. And if I devote myself to what's imperfect, how on earth can I ever be conformed to the image of perfection; how can I ever be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48)? But the thing is, we all commit a sort of idolatry: suitheism, the elevation of ourselves as our own little gods. Because every act of pride, every sin, is in effect a declaration that God is not the true lawmaker and that we know better how to run our lives; and that act of declaring ourselves the ultimate authorities on ourselves is idolatrous. And when we fall into the trap of worship of self, we get stuck in an infinitely vicious recursive loop. And if we're meant to be productive, then--figuratively speaking--that sort of self-worship strikes me as the ultimate in spiritual incest, if you'll pardon the somewhat disturbing imagery.

God doesn't lay down the law arbitrarily, as though it's fun to do so or anything like that; his commandments are a glimpse at the operating manual for our nature, the operating manual that comes with being made in his image. They're a guide to true human flourishing, to entering into the realm directed and guided and enlivened and illuminated by his Spirit. So when part of that operating manual says to be oriented out from ourselves and towards him, I don't think that's because of any neediness on his part--far from it! It's because it's not only the right thing to do, but it also happens to be ultimately good for us.

We're flawed. If you don't think you are, then the only advice I can give you is to do some serious reading of Paul's ethical exhortations and then to find somewhere quiet to do a whole lot of serious introspection. The best cure for delusions of perfection is a thorough self-examination in light of what we're supposed to be. For those of us with a more realistic image of ourselves, and especially those of us who can grasp that this problem isn't just a trifling matter, I think it's easier to see Lewis' point. Apart from Christ, I have some flaw deep inside of me that's killing me; it's like a fatal poison or terminal illness. It's like chronic pain for the soul, a metaphor I can definitely relate to. And I think that Lewis may very well be right: that flaw, that pride - because some form of pride is, I think, the ultimate ground of every sin - is something that will never let us be at peace until it's dealt with. In the life we're called to live, there's no room for pride or pretensions of autonomy; we have to concede that we haven't been put at the top of the pecking order, and in fact that we didn't pick our station in the great chain of being at all. We also have to put aside all our silly notions of second-guessing God - and, let's be honest, we all do it on a pretty regular basis. Unless we do all that, we'll never be fit to live the true life, the life we're meant to live.

So like Lewis said, that flaw, left unchecked, will keep on being magnified through our self-worship; just like a proper fraction multiplied by itself keeps getting smaller and smaller, so too does our deficiency get magnified every time we worship ourselves. And left unchecked, that shrivelling up will be hell. I'm enchanted by the way Lewis portrays hell in The Great Divorce, as the uttermost in smallness, where what was once a magnificent human being has, because of its orientation inward, just collapsed in on itself and diminished. And if God is the ground of all being and the ultimate source of existence, and if our sin and imperfection is a diminishment of being - again I borrow from Thomas Aquinas - then that continual process will bring us to asymptotically approach nothingness, just as even the continual multiplication of 0.99999 will eventually get closer and closer and closer to zero.

Perhaps it was Lewis who somewhere also said that to a reprobate man (or woman), the atmosphere of heaven would be more hell than hell itself; it's not the right polarity for him (or her), and it's simply too rich and too solid, the way Lewis portrayed the heavenly life in The Great Divorce. Just as some people can't handle natural food or natural air, and so can only stomach weaker things, so none of us, because of our sinfulness, are able of ourselves to handle the life we were meant to have, and can only be acclimatized properly through grace; like Lewis' fictional tourists from hell to heaven, so if a sinner were thrust into the sort of life we'll live in God's presence someday, it would be unbearably heavy and oppressive; it would be like putting a toddler in the middle of an NFL game. If we - spiritually speaking - purposefully infantilize ourselves and spurn the grace and love of God, we'll never be hardy enough for what we were made to do and be; we will forever be wasting away. We need to put off that weakness, extirpate that cancerous seed of hell within ourselves - or, to put it more truly, to throw down our shields and cooperate as Christ treats it throughout our lives so that it won't dominate our futures in the world to come. It's just like Lewis ended that essay: "The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once--this very day, this hour" (God in the Dock, p. 155).

Amen.

Short Thought on Love

As a Christian, I believe that God is Love. It says so in the Bible, after all (1 John 4:16). Lately I've been reading a book called Encountering the Mystery by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and one of my favorite lines so far in the book has been, "Love is the ultimate content of freedom and of eternity" (125).

As I was contemplating that this morning, and thinking about God as Love, a thought crossed my mind: the most God-like thing anyone can ever do is love. If Love is who God is, then to be not merely godly but in fact God-like, love those around you. Love everyone. Love the broken, reach out in love to everyone who has needs. Love can restore the world, because love is a divine act, the ultimate divine act. Love is the essence of our theosis, our divinization. Athanasius once said, God "was made man that we might be made god" (On the Incarnation 54.3). To paraphrase that, Love was made man that we might be made love, that every action of ours might be so saturated with love that no single word could ever sum us up as well as "love" can. Insofar as we truly love, we're conformed ever more to the image of the Holy Trinity, that eternal community of enduring, flawless Love. "Whoever lives in love lives in God" (1 John 4:16). Every act of love is, one could perhaps say, another step along the path of becoming a god by participation in the Divine Love that timelessly antedates all created things and encompasses the whole of creation. Love is the heartbeat of heaven and earth, and love will always, without a doubt, have the final word.

O holy fire of love divine, blaze in us. Consume all that is not born of love; purify us to be living icons of Love, the expression in our day of the true Love who came to dwell among us so many centuries ago. Let us be living, breathing mirrors of divine love in a world that so desperately needs to know love, to know Love. Amen.