Category: Commonplacing

The Athanasian Creed

Now this is the catholic (Christian) faith:

    That we worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity,
    neither blending their persons
    nor dividing their essence.
        For the person of the Father is a distinct person,
        the person of the Son is another,
        and that of the Holy Spirit still another.
        But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one,
        their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.

    What quality the Father has, the Son has, and the Holy Spirit has.
        The Father is uncreated,
        the Son is uncreated,
        the Holy Spirit is uncreated.

        The Father is immeasurable,
        the Son is immeasurable,
        the Holy Spirit is immeasurable.

        The Father is eternal,
        the Son is eternal,
        the Holy Spirit is eternal.

            And yet there are not three eternal beings;
            there is but one eternal being.
            So too there are not three uncreated or immeasurable beings;
            there is but one uncreated and immeasurable being.

    Similarly, the Father is almighty,
        the Son is almighty,
        the Holy Spirit is almighty.
            Yet there are not three almighty beings;
            there is but one almighty being.

        Thus the Father is God,
        the Son is God,
        the Holy Spirit is God.
            Yet there are not three gods;
            there is but one God.

        Thus the Father is Lord,
        the Son is Lord,
        the Holy Spirit is Lord.
            Yet there are not three lords;
            there is but one Lord.

    Just as Christian truth compels us
    to confess each person individually
    as both God and Lord,
    so catholic religion forbids us
    to say that there are three gods or lords.

    The Father was neither made nor created nor begotten from anyone.
    The Son was neither made nor created;
    he was begotten from the Father alone.
    The Holy Spirit was neither made nor created nor begotten;
    he proceeds from the Father and the Son.

    Accordingly there is one Father, not three fathers;
    there is one Son, not three sons;
    there is one Holy Spirit, not three holy spirits.

    Nothing in this trinity is before or after,
    nothing is greater or smaller;
    in their entirety the three persons
    are coeternal and coequal with each other.

    So in everything, as was said earlier,
    we must worship their trinity in their unity
    and their unity in their trinity.

Anyone then who desires to be saved
should think thus about the trinity.

But it is necessary for eternal salvation
that one also believe in the incarnation
of our Lord Jesus Christ faithfully.

Now this is the true faith:

    That we believe and confess
    that our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son,
    is both God and human, equally.

     He is God from the essence of the Father,
    begotten before time;
    and he is human from the essence of his mother,
    born in time;
    completely God, completely human,
    with a rational soul and human flesh;
    equal to the Father as regards divinity,
    less than the Father as regards humanity.

    Although he is God and human,
    yet Christ is not two, but one.
    He is one, however,
    not by his divinity being turned into flesh,
    but by God’s taking humanity to himself.
    He is one,
    certainly not by the blending of his essence,
    but by the unity of his person.
    For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh,
    so too the one Christ is both God and human.

    He suffered for our salvation;
    he descended to hell;
    he arose from the dead;
    he ascended to heaven;
    he is seated at the Father’s right hand;
    from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
    At his coming all people will arise bodily
    and give an accounting of their own deeds.
    Those who have done good will enter eternal life,
    and those who have done evil will enter eternal fire.

This is the catholic faith:
one cannot be saved without believing it firmly and faithfully.

The Suffering of Exile

As we follow the story of our Lord’s life we shall see that there is nothing at all that men can suffer that he did not suffer too. One of the greatest miseries which men endure is that of banishment from their own country. Thousands of men and women and children were driven from their homes in the last war, and may have never been able to return to them, and the people of Israel have endured the wretchedness of exile over and over again all through their history. And the sorrow of exile was the first of the sorrows that came to Our Lord.

Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World, p. 36-37.

Christ Revealed

If we are to participate into the very heart of Epiphany, to the very soul of its meaning for us, we need to do more than hear the Scripture account of the Magi. We also need to participate in a meditative way in the entire service of worship into which this story has been placed because this piece of the unfolding mystery of salvation is the key to the shape of our spiritual experience between now and Lent. Even as our Christmas spirituality was shaped by the dominant theme of the incarnation, so now our Epiphany spirituality will be shaped by the overriding theme of Christ’s manifestation as Savior of the world. Even as the incarnation finds its continuation in us through our union with Christ, so the Epiphany of Christ is extended in us through the practice of Epiphany spirituality. Our Epiphany journey can start at no better place than the Epiphany service of worship.  (Ancient-Future Time, p. 76)

Webber, Robert, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year. Baker Books, 2004.

The Journey of The Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

T.S. Eliot

Life Together Resolutions

· I shall marvel at and cultivate the work of the Holy Spirit in my own life, while forbearing the flaws, faults or problems in my neighbor’s life.

· As much as I am able, I shall be quick to forgive, acknowledging that I too have great need for forgiveness.

· I shall honor the Holy Spirit’s activity in my neighbor’s life even when it doesn’t seem evident!

· I shall seek to keep the unity of the Spirit in humility and love, by refusing to slander or gossip about my neighbor.

· I shall seek to acknowledge my wrongdoings and sins against others and ask often for forgiveness.

· I shall acknowledge that each one of us is fearfully and wonderfully made and delight in all the ways we are different.

· As much as it is up to me, I shall guard the unity of the Church and work hard to protect her reputation.

On Beauty and Suffering

…For beauty comes to us all in the moments that unravel our cynical surety as our hearts seem to come apart at the touch of some odd slant of light on an evening walk. Or we hear the strained thread of some beloved old music that seems to break the spell of doubt. We read a novel, a story of someone who forgave or fought or hoped, and we feel something stir to life as precious, as fragile, as urgent as a newborn child within us. We are encountered by beauty, and suddenly the story of our grief seems to be the passing thing- that faint, ghostly illusion that one day will melt in the beams of a great, inexorable love.

My deep belief is that beauty has a story to tell, one that was meant by God to speak to us of his character and reality, meant to grip our failing hands with hope. We know God when we behold his beauty, when his goodness invades the secret rooms of our hearts. To believe the truth beauty tells: this is our great struggle from the depths of our grief. To trust the hope it teaches us to hunger toward: this is our fierce battle. To craft the world it helps us to imagine: this is our creative, death-defying work.

Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth, p. 22.

These quotes and others that don’t include a post written by me are categorized under commonplacing – which simply means a collection of inspiring quotes or other material attributed to another writer, artist…

Repentance

It is one thing to love sin and to force ourselves to quit it, it is another thing to hate sin because love for God is so gripping that the sin no longer appeals. The latter is repentance, the former is reform. It is repentance that God requires. Repentance is a “change of mind.” To love and yet quit it is not the same as hating it and quitting it. Your supposed victory over sin may be simple displacement. You may love one sin so much (such as your pride) that you will curtail another more embarrassing sin which you also love. This may look spiritual, but there is nothing of God in it. Natural men do it every day. Jim Ellif

The Passover Meal

“And then came words they had not heard before.

‘Take, eat; this is my Body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’

They must have looked up, startled. What did he mean?

They must have looked at his body, and remembered how ceaselessly it had been spent and given in the toil of love ever since they had known him. How his body would be given for them on the cross, broken for his children at every Eucharist until the world’s end, they could not know yet, but as they took the bread that he gave them, and ate it in wonder and reverence, there must have been a confused prayer in their hearts that their bodies too might become bodies of love to live and die for him.”

Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World

photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel