Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Tony Cayless, AHC
RCL - Ascension Day A - Thursday 01 May 2008
Acts 1:1-11
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53
In the Acts of the Apostles - our first reading - Luke refers to Jesus' last Resurrection appearance. It was in the Upper Room of John Mark's mother's house. There were about 120 persons gathered there and we read: when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.
The period between Ascension and Pentecost is a period of waiting. Those men and women who had been attracted to Jesus, become followers of Jesus, been taught by Jesus, been eye witnesses of the Resurrection, were told to go into Jerusalem and wait, wait for the promise of the Father. The promise was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. They returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
This Feast reminds us that we still live between the times. The Ascension Event when the physical presence of Jesus the Christ was withdrawn is in the past. The parousia when the Lord will become present in power and with great glory is in the future. This between the times is the age of the Church.
When the Word became human the Word accepted all the limitations of human nature. The human Jesus was born, lived, ministered, died and rose again in a particular place and at a particular time in the history of this world. The Word made Flesh, the Incarnate Lord, like us was capable of being be in one place at one time only. The ascended Jesus can be present at all times and in all places.
After the Ascension Jesus in his resurrection body made no more appearances. The Incarnate Word of God had ended that phase of the mission. The reconciliation between God and humanity is accomplished by God putting God's self in our environment at the Incarnation, and by humanity being put in God's environment at the Ascension.
The Ascension is the taking of our human nature into that territory where never before were we allowed to go.
The kind of people that we human beings are is illustrated in the ancient and true myth of Adam and Eve. Because of their wrong choices they were cast out of paradise. Then we are told: God placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. For Adam and Eve there was no going back to Eden.
For the rest of humankind there is no going back anywhere. We can never go back, but we can go forward and look forward to the time when St. John the Divine says the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.
Our human nature is in heaven in the person of Jesus Christ. St. Augustine said "this festival confirms the grace of all the festivals of the church together, for without the Ascension, the reality of every festival would perish. Unless the savior had ascended into heaven, his nativity would have come to nothing and his passion would have born no fruit for us, and his most holy resurrection would have been worthless".
There is a story that when Jesus arrived back in Heaven the Archangel Gabriel asked him what plans he had made to ensure that God's mission would continue on earth. Jesus replied, "I have left my Church, The apostles Peter and James and John, Andrew, and seven others whom I appointed, and my Mother Mary, my friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany, Cleopas, Mark, Bartimaeus, Johanna, Susanna, and about a 100 others. They have been commissioned to go out into all the world and make more disciples. They will carry out my mission". "But" said the Archangel, "But what if they should fail?" Jesus answered firmly: "I have made no other arrangements."
No other arrangements. Just the Church as it was then and just the Church as it is now. . . . . Including us! AMEN
COME LORD JESUS! Be known to us in the Breaking of the Bread.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
RCL - Easter 6 A - 27 Apr 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
RCL - Easter 6 A - Sunday 27 April 2008
Acts 17:22-31
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” In my mind this is one of the most sublimely beautiful passages in all scripture.
The reason I love this text so much has less to do with the text and more to do with the way Thomas Tallis created a musical setting of this text.
A little history - Thomas Tallis is one of the greatest composers England has given to the world - and that is saying a lot. But Tallis also had the wonderful and terrible timing to be born in the reign of Henry the VII. He was an exact contemporary of Thomas Cranmer and Henry VIII. In other words, he was the finest living composer of his day, and his day was the English Reformation.
Tallis was a scholar and musician who worked in powerful monastic houses. He had it made. He had the time and resources to perfect his craft. He never had to worry about where his next meal would come from. He could just compose and make music.
And then things changed. Henry VIII, King of England, began the process of remaking the church in England into the Church of England. It was a complicated and frequently bloody process that, among other things, included the dissolving of the monasteries. Sorry Mr. Tallis - you need a new job and a new home.
Henry gave way to Edward, a radical protestant. Edward gave way to Mary, a devout Roman Catholic. And Mary gave way to Elizabeth who some would argue was the first actual Anglican monarch to head the Church of England.
And through this, Thomas Tallis kept composing. That he survived at all and died a natural death is an achievement. As the monarch changed, so did the relationship between head and body for many in Church.
Tallis didn’t survive by staying at the fringes with his head down, or by keeping near the middle of the road with no particular conviction. Partly he survived because he was willing compromise - Edward wants this... I’ll can do this... Mary wants that... I can do that. But mostly he survived, I believe, because he was truly an inspired genius. Keep the word “inspired” in the back of your mind because I’m going to come back to it. It is the entire point of this sermon.
Among Tallis’s works are some of the finest examples of late Renaissance polyphony that can be found. His music is as lavishly rich and wonderfully florid as any being written in Rome. He stands up well next to Gabrieli and Palestrina - also his contemporaries.
But the English reformation placed an unusual demand on composers. Thomas Cranmer had a strong conviction that the highly florid, melismatic writing popular in the Church was un-Godly. For Cranmer, understanding the words was essential. Worship in a language “understanded of the people” was, after all, an article of religion.
Those utterly beautiful, other-worldly stretches late Renaissance polyphony where one syllable of one word can stretch on for a page or two, may have pleased the ear, but the text was utterly lost in a wash of sound; Unacceptable to Thomas Cranmer, so he devised a standard which Henry issued in a proclamation - in church music there would be, so near as possible, one note for every syllable and one syllable for every note.
Goodbye florid polyphony.
Thomas Tallis not only needed a new job and a new home, he had to master an entirely new style. He could only compose as many notes as there were syllables in his text... This, I suppose, is like restricting a poet to only the vocabulary found in the daily papers; or restricting a painter to only primary colors. Congratulations Mr Da Vinci - here is your new studio. And here is the box of Crayola crayons that you will be allowed to use - please stay within the lines and don’t let any of the colors run together... create masterpieces... any questions?
“If you love me you will keep my commandments. I will pray the Father and he will give you another Counselor, even the spirit of truth.”
Thomas Tallis was inspired - that is to say filled with the Spirit. His music testifies to that. It is this Spirit that allowed Thomas Tallis not only to survive, but to create exquisite works of beauty, works that reflect in their own way the beauty of God.
When Thomas Tallis set this Gospel text to music he created what has often been described as the most perfect English anthem - simple almost to the point of being stark, yet transcendent. Moreover, he followed the King’s proclamation - there is, so much as possible, only one note per syllable, one syllable per note. When you hear the anthem, you hear the Gospel. Nothing standing in front or beside or behind.
So why, other than the fact that I really love the music of Thomas Tallis, am I going on about this...
Mircea Elliade in his book The Sacred and the Profane argues that manifestations of the sacred are the basis of meaning in our world. When we see the gentle rain watering the earth, we see it as a manifestation of God, as God’s sacred involvement in creation. The profane world lacks this meaning. It just sees rain... just a natural process.
The secular person cannot see the sacred. The secular person might find a flower quite beautiful, but the spiritual person, the poet Christopher Smart for example, sees flowers as the peculiar poetry of Christ. The secular person sees the profane and the Godly person sees the sacred - though they are looking at the same thing.
“Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot see or know...” The sacred is not visible to the secular.
We are not secular people. We are children of God. We abide with the Spirit of Truth.
Our challenge, our calling is to take that vision of the Spirit with us into daily life - to bring transcendence to the mundane, the earthbound. For we can have no doubt about God’s commands - We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and body and mind and spirit; and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Its not enough to see the peculiar poetry of Christ - we have to live it.
Brother Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
RCL - Easter 6 A - Sunday 27 April 2008
Acts 17:22-31
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” In my mind this is one of the most sublimely beautiful passages in all scripture.
The reason I love this text so much has less to do with the text and more to do with the way Thomas Tallis created a musical setting of this text.
A little history - Thomas Tallis is one of the greatest composers England has given to the world - and that is saying a lot. But Tallis also had the wonderful and terrible timing to be born in the reign of Henry the VII. He was an exact contemporary of Thomas Cranmer and Henry VIII. In other words, he was the finest living composer of his day, and his day was the English Reformation.
Tallis was a scholar and musician who worked in powerful monastic houses. He had it made. He had the time and resources to perfect his craft. He never had to worry about where his next meal would come from. He could just compose and make music.
And then things changed. Henry VIII, King of England, began the process of remaking the church in England into the Church of England. It was a complicated and frequently bloody process that, among other things, included the dissolving of the monasteries. Sorry Mr. Tallis - you need a new job and a new home.Henry gave way to Edward, a radical protestant. Edward gave way to Mary, a devout Roman Catholic. And Mary gave way to Elizabeth who some would argue was the first actual Anglican monarch to head the Church of England.
And through this, Thomas Tallis kept composing. That he survived at all and died a natural death is an achievement. As the monarch changed, so did the relationship between head and body for many in Church.
Tallis didn’t survive by staying at the fringes with his head down, or by keeping near the middle of the road with no particular conviction. Partly he survived because he was willing compromise - Edward wants this... I’ll can do this... Mary wants that... I can do that. But mostly he survived, I believe, because he was truly an inspired genius. Keep the word “inspired” in the back of your mind because I’m going to come back to it. It is the entire point of this sermon.
Among Tallis’s works are some of the finest examples of late Renaissance polyphony that can be found. His music is as lavishly rich and wonderfully florid as any being written in Rome. He stands up well next to Gabrieli and Palestrina - also his contemporaries.
But the English reformation placed an unusual demand on composers. Thomas Cranmer had a strong conviction that the highly florid, melismatic writing popular in the Church was un-Godly. For Cranmer, understanding the words was essential. Worship in a language “understanded of the people” was, after all, an article of religion.
Those utterly beautiful, other-worldly stretches late Renaissance polyphony where one syllable of one word can stretch on for a page or two, may have pleased the ear, but the text was utterly lost in a wash of sound; Unacceptable to Thomas Cranmer, so he devised a standard which Henry issued in a proclamation - in church music there would be, so near as possible, one note for every syllable and one syllable for every note.
Goodbye florid polyphony.
Thomas Tallis not only needed a new job and a new home, he had to master an entirely new style. He could only compose as many notes as there were syllables in his text... This, I suppose, is like restricting a poet to only the vocabulary found in the daily papers; or restricting a painter to only primary colors. Congratulations Mr Da Vinci - here is your new studio. And here is the box of Crayola crayons that you will be allowed to use - please stay within the lines and don’t let any of the colors run together... create masterpieces... any questions?
“If you love me you will keep my commandments. I will pray the Father and he will give you another Counselor, even the spirit of truth.”
Thomas Tallis was inspired - that is to say filled with the Spirit. His music testifies to that. It is this Spirit that allowed Thomas Tallis not only to survive, but to create exquisite works of beauty, works that reflect in their own way the beauty of God.
When Thomas Tallis set this Gospel text to music he created what has often been described as the most perfect English anthem - simple almost to the point of being stark, yet transcendent. Moreover, he followed the King’s proclamation - there is, so much as possible, only one note per syllable, one syllable per note. When you hear the anthem, you hear the Gospel. Nothing standing in front or beside or behind.
So why, other than the fact that I really love the music of Thomas Tallis, am I going on about this...
Mircea Elliade in his book The Sacred and the Profane argues that manifestations of the sacred are the basis of meaning in our world. When we see the gentle rain watering the earth, we see it as a manifestation of God, as God’s sacred involvement in creation. The profane world lacks this meaning. It just sees rain... just a natural process.
The secular person cannot see the sacred. The secular person might find a flower quite beautiful, but the spiritual person, the poet Christopher Smart for example, sees flowers as the peculiar poetry of Christ. The secular person sees the profane and the Godly person sees the sacred - though they are looking at the same thing.
“Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot see or know...” The sacred is not visible to the secular.
We are not secular people. We are children of God. We abide with the Spirit of Truth.
Our challenge, our calling is to take that vision of the Spirit with us into daily life - to bring transcendence to the mundane, the earthbound. For we can have no doubt about God’s commands - We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and body and mind and spirit; and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Its not enough to see the peculiar poetry of Christ - we have to live it.
For some of us, as I have talked about Tallis’s anthem, it has been ringing in our ears. But others will be unfamiliar with it. So I want to conclude today by letting it speak for itself.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
RCL - Easter 5 A - 20 Apr 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother James Randall Greve, OHC
RCL - Easter 5 A - Sunday 20 April 2008
Acts 2:42-47
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10: 1-10
We live in an age when the proclamation and defense of revealed truth which transcends our opinions and feelings is viewed with caution, even within parts of the Church. Some within the Church emphasize the complex, the gray, the unknowable at the expense of the simple and black and white and known. While there is of course mystery and complexity within Christian theology, our faithful reaction is to be more a bowing of the knee than a scratching of the head.
The Gospel of John is addressed to those who would rather be bystanders and critics than actually give their lives to believing and living truth. The Evangelist is constantly challenging us to stop and pay attention, look and listen again, knowing that what we think is real, what we believe is right, may be an illusion. The assumption is that Truth has revealed itself and St. John is making a legal argument for the authenticity of the claims of the Son of God.
For St. John, anything short of believing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who gives eternal life is not merely a different point of view or an expression of diversity, it is ignorance and blindness and despair. John does not want us merely to concede the point, but to have the power of the truth of Christ break into us and revolutionize us. We are upside-downed by a Christ who declares that only when we are stood on our heads do we see the world as God sees it - as it really is - only then can we perceive the spiritual reality that we look at but don’t see. Seeing and knowing and believing are one and the same.
Paradox is the norm in this upside-down world of the Fourth Gospel: the beginning is the end, water makes you thirsty, blindness is sight, sight is blindness, being born again is growing up, death is glory, Good Friday is Easter. John is realistic about how hard this is to swallow. As Jesus begins to proclaim news of this upside-down world, we meet skeptical disciples, a skeptical Nicodemus, a skeptical woman at the well and crowds who just want their bellies filled. The encounters with Christ are intimate, personal, messy and unresolved, full of conflict, leaving us hanging - just like ours.
Above all no one - no one - is neutral. Everyone thinks they know what salvation will mean when it comes - no one at first is looking for the Jesus who shows up. Those who have too great a stake in preserving the right side up status quo will have none of this and have Jesus crucified. What appears as Messiah is so far beyond anyone’s expectations as to be incomprehensible and outrageous. The conversion that takes place in the disciples and others is a conversion from ignorance to knowing, from blindness to sight, from adequate to overwhelming as they are willing to be known and respond with faith that Jesus is the Son of God.
As we come to today’s reading, we peer into the Upper Room as Jesus goes down to wash the disciples’ feet on the last night of his life and listen in on his farewell discourse to his disciples. It is Maundy Thursday but it is already Easter. Christ is present in that room but beyond the walls of that room - already speaking to a young, struggling church. Surely these disciples, after hearing the words and seeing the miraculous signs since way back in chapter one would finally understand what’s going on, would have come to know who this person Jesus is, right? No!
Hours away from the crucifixion Thomas and Philip are still talking like they have yet to believe very much at all - and all except the beloved disciple will flee as Jesus is arrested before the night is over. Jesus reminds them all that observation does not magically produce faith. Philip’s request to “show us the Father and then we will be satisfied” reveals an exasperating ignorance of who Jesus is. Philip has merely looked but not seen.
The Lord’s question in response is perhaps the saddest in all of Holy Scripture: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” Here is the startling reality repeated throughout the Gospel: the irreconcilable conflict between the drive to have meaning on our own terms and in our own way and the way of Life which is the giving over of our own terms and our own way for the better way of the Gospel.
Philip’s request is the primary trap in the spiritual life. It is the original and most powerful temptation for all of us; to believe the lie that something beyond what we have, beyond what lives within us, beyond the whole of the blessed and holy Trinity will satisfy. Philip has succumbed to the elusive dream of satisfaction - the religion of one-moreness that holds out, like a carrot on a stick, the promise of lasting pleasure, escape from our human struggle and therefore escape from God.
Our selfish nature lusts after the mirage of satisfaction. As fallen creatures we are on the lookout for a quick fix and an easy out. We become conditioned to the instant catering of every whim, the filling of every hunger. Philip is like so much of our culture that keeps asking for just a little more show, a little more excitement, a little less faith and wonder and waiting. We want a God who gives feel-good meaning, who responds to what we believe we need, not one to whom we owe all being and life, one who gives life through sacrifice, surrender, and death to self.
At the redeemed, divine center of his being Philip’s real self wants what we all want - to know and experience our deep thirst quenched with living water, to be ravished by a God who can absorb and embrace our pain and mystery and wandering, for a quest bigger than ourselves, for truth that grips us with such power we would die before we compromised our faith. All of that is ours. All of that in Christ is sufficient. We can choose to live in the world of Philip, the right-side up world of more and more and the futile chase for satisfaction.
But as Flannery O’Connor says in The Violent Bear It Away, we would have to call that the church without Christ, where, as she says “the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and what’s dead stays that way.”
Life in Christ, on the other hand, is the invitation to give our lives and wills over to God without conditions on what that giving will cost us or where it will lead us or what it will look like. We are commanded to convert the desire for satisfaction into the acceptance of sufficiency in the faithful nurturing of the relationship with Christ through the ups and downs of emotions and consolations, times of peace and fear, dryness and refreshment, dark nights and bright days. Sufficiency is the gift of seeing that we must pitch the plastic and false imitation of life and see and know Christ dwelling within us in grace, mercy, and abiding love. The whole of the holy and blessed Trinity dwells within us.
Amen.
Brother James Randall Greve, OHC
RCL - Easter 5 A - Sunday 20 April 2008
Acts 2:42-47
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10: 1-10
Thomas Ward, an Episcopal priest who contributed to a new anthology on centering prayer titled Spirituality, Contemplation, and Transformation, tells this anecdote about a moment when he was startled at the profound reality of Christian truth and our identity in it:
“Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.”
Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”
The whole, in me? Our reactions to such a statement can cover the spectrum: Some of you are thinking “of course”. Others of you are thinking “there must be a catch”, or “divine truth is completely ethereal, mysterious, inexpressible, and unattainable, we can only guess.” Or “How could Father Keating make such a statement? It is just his opinion, after all. Who does he think he is?”
Once in a question-and-answer session at a centering prayer retreat held at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, Thomas Keating said, “The whole of the holy and blessed Trinity dwells within us.” I found that statement more than I could digest, and so I asked Father Keating to say more about it. He looked at me and said, “The whole of the holy and blessed Trinity dwells within us.”
It was almost too outrageous to accept, Ward goes on to say.
We live in an age when the proclamation and defense of revealed truth which transcends our opinions and feelings is viewed with caution, even within parts of the Church. Some within the Church emphasize the complex, the gray, the unknowable at the expense of the simple and black and white and known. While there is of course mystery and complexity within Christian theology, our faithful reaction is to be more a bowing of the knee than a scratching of the head.
The Gospel of John is addressed to those who would rather be bystanders and critics than actually give their lives to believing and living truth. The Evangelist is constantly challenging us to stop and pay attention, look and listen again, knowing that what we think is real, what we believe is right, may be an illusion. The assumption is that Truth has revealed itself and St. John is making a legal argument for the authenticity of the claims of the Son of God.
For St. John, anything short of believing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who gives eternal life is not merely a different point of view or an expression of diversity, it is ignorance and blindness and despair. John does not want us merely to concede the point, but to have the power of the truth of Christ break into us and revolutionize us. We are upside-downed by a Christ who declares that only when we are stood on our heads do we see the world as God sees it - as it really is - only then can we perceive the spiritual reality that we look at but don’t see. Seeing and knowing and believing are one and the same.
Paradox is the norm in this upside-down world of the Fourth Gospel: the beginning is the end, water makes you thirsty, blindness is sight, sight is blindness, being born again is growing up, death is glory, Good Friday is Easter. John is realistic about how hard this is to swallow. As Jesus begins to proclaim news of this upside-down world, we meet skeptical disciples, a skeptical Nicodemus, a skeptical woman at the well and crowds who just want their bellies filled. The encounters with Christ are intimate, personal, messy and unresolved, full of conflict, leaving us hanging - just like ours.
Above all no one - no one - is neutral. Everyone thinks they know what salvation will mean when it comes - no one at first is looking for the Jesus who shows up. Those who have too great a stake in preserving the right side up status quo will have none of this and have Jesus crucified. What appears as Messiah is so far beyond anyone’s expectations as to be incomprehensible and outrageous. The conversion that takes place in the disciples and others is a conversion from ignorance to knowing, from blindness to sight, from adequate to overwhelming as they are willing to be known and respond with faith that Jesus is the Son of God.
As we come to today’s reading, we peer into the Upper Room as Jesus goes down to wash the disciples’ feet on the last night of his life and listen in on his farewell discourse to his disciples. It is Maundy Thursday but it is already Easter. Christ is present in that room but beyond the walls of that room - already speaking to a young, struggling church. Surely these disciples, after hearing the words and seeing the miraculous signs since way back in chapter one would finally understand what’s going on, would have come to know who this person Jesus is, right? No!
Hours away from the crucifixion Thomas and Philip are still talking like they have yet to believe very much at all - and all except the beloved disciple will flee as Jesus is arrested before the night is over. Jesus reminds them all that observation does not magically produce faith. Philip’s request to “show us the Father and then we will be satisfied” reveals an exasperating ignorance of who Jesus is. Philip has merely looked but not seen.
The Lord’s question in response is perhaps the saddest in all of Holy Scripture: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” Here is the startling reality repeated throughout the Gospel: the irreconcilable conflict between the drive to have meaning on our own terms and in our own way and the way of Life which is the giving over of our own terms and our own way for the better way of the Gospel.
Philip’s request is the primary trap in the spiritual life. It is the original and most powerful temptation for all of us; to believe the lie that something beyond what we have, beyond what lives within us, beyond the whole of the blessed and holy Trinity will satisfy. Philip has succumbed to the elusive dream of satisfaction - the religion of one-moreness that holds out, like a carrot on a stick, the promise of lasting pleasure, escape from our human struggle and therefore escape from God.
Our selfish nature lusts after the mirage of satisfaction. As fallen creatures we are on the lookout for a quick fix and an easy out. We become conditioned to the instant catering of every whim, the filling of every hunger. Philip is like so much of our culture that keeps asking for just a little more show, a little more excitement, a little less faith and wonder and waiting. We want a God who gives feel-good meaning, who responds to what we believe we need, not one to whom we owe all being and life, one who gives life through sacrifice, surrender, and death to self.
At the redeemed, divine center of his being Philip’s real self wants what we all want - to know and experience our deep thirst quenched with living water, to be ravished by a God who can absorb and embrace our pain and mystery and wandering, for a quest bigger than ourselves, for truth that grips us with such power we would die before we compromised our faith. All of that is ours. All of that in Christ is sufficient. We can choose to live in the world of Philip, the right-side up world of more and more and the futile chase for satisfaction.
But as Flannery O’Connor says in The Violent Bear It Away, we would have to call that the church without Christ, where, as she says “the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and what’s dead stays that way.”
Life in Christ, on the other hand, is the invitation to give our lives and wills over to God without conditions on what that giving will cost us or where it will lead us or what it will look like. We are commanded to convert the desire for satisfaction into the acceptance of sufficiency in the faithful nurturing of the relationship with Christ through the ups and downs of emotions and consolations, times of peace and fear, dryness and refreshment, dark nights and bright days. Sufficiency is the gift of seeing that we must pitch the plastic and false imitation of life and see and know Christ dwelling within us in grace, mercy, and abiding love. The whole of the holy and blessed Trinity dwells within us.
Amen.
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