Category: Reflections
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When Your Ancestors Came to Church
Human beings carry within them a burden of time. We are not “fresh starts” as we come into existence. There is an inheritance that seems to carry even more than our genes. Some few years ago, I visited with my father’s oldest surviving cousin. She had known both of my parents across the years, and…
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The Life of the Cosmos
This is a reprint from 2016. I ran across it this morning and found it speaking very much of where my mind and heart have been of late. May it be of use to you. What does it mean to be alive? This is a question whose answer would seem so obvious that it is…
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The Communion of Giving Thanks
Whom should I thank? The question is normally a matter of polite acknowledgement. A gift was given and received. Who gave it? Whom should I thank? It is inherently the nature of giving thanks that thanks must be given to someone. I cannot give thanks to nothing or no one. As such, the giving of…
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The Secular Mind Versus the Whole Heart
Thinking is among the most misleading things in the modern world, or, to be more precise, thinking about thinking is misleading. For a culture that puts such a great emphasis on materiality, our thinking about thought is decidedly spooky. The philosophy underlying our strangely-constructed modernity is called nominalism (of which there are many formal varieties). Its imaginary…
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“That Which Is Lacking” – Is Jesus Enough?
Recent questions on the blog make this article worth re-visiting. I pray you find it of interest. The average Christian, reading his Bible in happy devotion, stumbles across this passage: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the…
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Becoming Personal
“Person” is among the most difficult words in the classical Christian vocabulary. It is difficult on the one hand because the word has a common meaning in modern parlance that is not the same meaning as its classical one. And it is difficult on the other hand even when all of its later meanings and associations…
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Marriage as a Lifetime of Suffering
This article first appeared in 2015. I have thought it worth re-publishing in honor of mine and my wife’s celebration of 50 years of marriage, joined this past weekend by my children and grandchildren and a host of friends. The service (a molieben with additional prayers appropriate to the occasion) had many of the prayers…
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The Eye of Evil and the Eye of Light
Throughout the film version of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the image of the “Eye of Sauron,” a tower with a great fiery eye burning at its peak, is an abiding threat overhanging every moment of conflict, every chance encounter. It threatens to interrupt the quest to destroy the Ring of Power. It is an…
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Truth, Lies, and Icons
As verbal beings, we live in a world of icons. We experience the world in an iconic fashion. A major difficulty for us is that we have lost the vocabulary of iconic reality. We have substituted the language of photography. The dissonance between reality and our photographic assumptions has led us to doubt both. Man…
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The Path of the Good, the True, the Real
Imagine a character in a story who is wraith-like, barely existing. His every move threatens to draw him deeper into non-existence. As it stands, others around him are only able to see him moments at a time. He often disappears for whole days at a time as he lapses into such ghostly non-being that he…
…God help us to recognize the desert as such when it comes and that we don’t run or resist. I…