Today is the shortest day of the year

To be more exact, this is the day with the least sunlight. Tomorrow the sunlight is on the increase. I like that!!! It’s going to get colder, but in the middle of it all, it’s going to get brighter. It’s the light I want, whatever the weather.

It’s the Light of the world I want, whatever the weather. Jesus asked the blind man what he wanted. (Duh!!!!!) Ask me what I want and my answer will be as this man’s – Jesus, I want to see. More than I want it easy. More than I want it comfortable. More than I want it painless. Cows can have all these things. But I want to behold – to apprehend the glory, to see the radiance, to be stunned by the beatific vision.

As the days increase, may I be granted my request that the light in my soul grow, that Christ would come out of the shadows that I may marvel at Him. Everything else is straw.

Today’s Quote, 12/21/06

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. It is then that he is empty, insufficient, dependent, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair.   Blaise Pascal

Do I want to go back to the 1st century church? No.

Often the great cry of revivalist movements is a return to the book of Acts and the times of the early church. That sounds intriguing but it has always seemed something too easily said, a sort of Luddite version of Christianity. Of course, the hunger is for fresh experiences of spiritual power, simplicity of focus, the rapid expansion of the Church apart from marketing, bureaucracy, and all the baggage of modern church life. 

But it is also the cry of the cults and the simple. They seem to have a running theme that the church has corrupted Christianity and the only way to return to purity is a return to the early church life and patterns. The question is, whose version of the early church? And also, why would we want to return to the embryonic stage of development rather than draw from 2,000 years of development, reflection and examples of heroism, faithfulness and virtue. Would I want to live in a time before the great shaping creeds of the church that hammered out an orthodoxy that has sustained Christian discipleship for hundreds of years? Would I want to live in a time before Augustine and Aquinas? Would I want to live in a time before Christianity moved into the centers of intellectual dominance and established itself as a real alternative worldview? Would I want to live in a time before the great mystical writings of the fifth and sixth centuries? No, no, no, no.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, a convert to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism in the 1800s, made the strongest case for this position. His position against Protestant simplicity was that since the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth and itself a means of God’s self-revelation, the desire to return to the church’s embryonic state is a self-defeating proposition. What adult would want to return to childhood? (On second thought, there might be something to that – as they say, you can’t be young forever but you can always be immature!!!!) There are things gained that are precious – and indeed necessary for moving on. The church by definition cannot be what it was, should not be what it was.

The sources of the church’s life are there in the Book of Acts – the apostolic tradition, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the emerging authority of those writings which would soon be recognized as inspired, the evangelistic impulse, etc. Those sources remain sources still. But like a snowball rolling downhill they now come to us with larger dimensions and potentially more powerful impact.

No, don’t take me back to the Book of Acts. Move me forward to the Bride ready for the Bridegroom, refined through the fires of trial, made more glorious through reflection, devotion and steadfast love for the departed but coming again Jesus. Give me a church not at its beginning but in its maturity with many a lesson learned, howbeit the hard way.