the christian calendar on Exclusion

Lord, you whose Son did pray that all your children might be one, we come with repentance for the sin of useless division and for the secret vice of pride. We beg forgiveness for harsh judgment, for p...

Self-denial means knowing only Christ, and no longer oneself. It means seeing only Christ, who goes ahead of us, and no longer the path that is too difficult for us… . Self-denial is saying only: He g...

If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.

[Holy Saturday] means there is no part of human existence to which Christ did not ‘descend.’

Self-examination is not morbid introspection or self-condemnation, but the honest, fearless confrontation of the self, and its abandonment to God in trust.

No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.

Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.

Advent is a coming, not our coming to God, but his to us. We cannot come to God, he is beyond our reach; but he can come to us, for we are not beneath his mercy.

For Lent this year, I’m just giving up.

Easter is the only time when it’s perfectly safe to put all your eggs in one basket.

What self denial! What self abasement! What self emptying! He, whom no infinitudes can hold, is contained within infant’s age, and infant’s form. Can it be, that the great ‘I AM THAT I AM’ shrinks int...

Good Father, we thank you for inviting us to your table. You invite us to your heavenly feast, but we don’t show up to the party. Rather, we ignore your invitation, we get distracted by other work we ...

Eternal God, whose covenant with us is never broken, we confess that we fail to fulfill your will. Though you have bound yourself to us, we will not bind ourselves to you. In Jesus Christ you serve u...

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

The Easter message tells us that our enemies—sin, the curse, and death—are beaten. Ultimately they can longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not foug...

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship.

On Holy Saturday Jesus entered into the kind of forsakenness and abandonment beyond anything any person could experience. He was not content to deal with our sin problem; his love extended into the wo...

The story of Passion-Tide and Easter is the story of the winning of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of Time. The burden of the guilt is accepted (“He was made Sin”), the last agony of ...

Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God's sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.

For lent I gave up Catholicism

Lent is a time of going very deeply into ourselves… What is it that stands between us and God? Between us and our brothers and sisters? Between us and life, the life of the Spirit? Whatever it is, let...

The world has always despised people from the wrong places and with the wrong credentials. We are always trying to justify ourselves. We need desperately to feel superior to others. And everything abo...

When I recite this in church [Jesus’ decent into Hell], I think there is just no place where the encompassing love of God can’t be present. There is no place where God is afraid to go.

Faith is a voluntary anticipation.

Just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil an...

We will never know, this side of heaven, what terrible struggles took place in the spiritual world between Palm Sunday and Easter morning.

There's no need to be the richest man in the cemetery. You can't do any business from there.

To Lent or Not to Lent As someone who grew up Catholic but who "crossed the Tiber north" in middle school (to Presbyterian land), I've experienced some very different perspectives on wh...

Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault-finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the ...

Amazed, bewildered, they are gathered around him, whose pondered resolution comes to rest, withdrawing him from all the ties that bound him--a stranger gliding by with thoughts unguessed. He feels tha...