relationships and community on Cruciform Life

Cruciform self-giving is the distinctive dimension of holiness.

Gaining spiritual life is conditional on suffering loss. We cannot measure our lives in terms of "gain"; they must be measured in terms of "loss." Our real capacity lies not in how...

When I teach on the dynamics of real change and maturation, I often describe a “furnace of transformation” each of us must pass through for the sake of growth and refinement. I’ve never seen real grow...

Exposed to public view like slabs of meat hung from a market stall, troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses…past. No death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion. To be hung nake...

A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-suffiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage.

Cruciform love is welcoming the immigrant simply because they bear the image of God, even if the only thing they bring to us is hassle and possible harm. Cruciform love is praying for those who persec...

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

The Christian life is not a life dripping with personal satisfaction or one of basking in feeling “positive.” It isn’t a life baptized in stimulation or excitement. It definitely isn’t a life of conse...

Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. Don’t be conformed to this world, bu...

The Christian life depends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical body.

Brothers and sisters, God does not leave us in our distress. He does not abandon us to our devilish decisions. While we choose to starve ourselves on a diet of our own making and choosing that leads t...

None of us are there yet, but if we each have this attitude, we will put to death our reactions to criticisms and offenses. And though we may still stumble, we will learn that carrying the cross is no...

Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.

St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ, the revelation of God become human, “set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It wa...

You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross”—in other words, it is like going to be beaten ...

This total self-giving, to which the Son and the Spirit respond by an equal self-giving, is a kind of “death,” a first, radical “kenosis,” as one might say. It is a kind of “super-death” that is a com...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

Let this be thy whole Endeavour, this thy prayer, this thy desire, that thou mayest be stripped of all selfishness, and with entire simplicity follow Jesus only.

The Trinity is a circle of shared life, and the life is full, not empty, abounding and rich and beautiful.

When I was considering the possibility of embracing Christian faith as a young college student, what I feared most was that it would make my life smaller rather than larger—less love, less joy, less c...

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.

A passage often referred to in order to describe the sacrificial, countercultural quality of the early church comes to us interestingly enough, from one of its strongest critics, known later to histor...

My wife, Lauretta, once remarked to me, “I know I’d die for Christ. If I were put in front of a firing squad and commanded to renounce Christ or die, I know I’d say ‘Shoot me!’ That would be easy. The...

I’d like us to begin with a little scene setting. So, I’m going to invite everyone who is comfortable to close their eyes. And I am transporting you to Rome, it’s approximately 60 AD. You are a commo...

Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complain...

In his excellent book on the desert fathers, Where God Happens , former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells of an encounter between two monastic fathers. The first was Macarius, famous in...

The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it...

In the early fifth century, even as Rome had officially embraced Christianity, the brutal spectacle of gladiatorial combat continued in the Colosseum, drawing massive crowds. One day, a Christian herm...

God of the common and of the uncommon. You meet us in the ordinary routines of life–when we play and when we rest, while we work and while we worship. And You reveal yourself in the extraordinary, too...

[Paying attention to those suffering most in a community] is a fundamental and paradoxical principle that goes to the heart of the gospel and the nature of eschatological existence.