"The Anglican Communion has no peculiar thought, practice, creed or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ's Church from the beginning."
- Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of Canterbury
Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, martyred for Christ in 156
"O happy fault! If we weren't sinners and didn't need pardon more than bread, we'd have no way of knowing how deep God's love is."
- Louis Evely
"Avoid, like the plague, a clergyman who is also a businessman."
- St. Jerome
"Slander is worse than cannibalism."
- St. John Chrysostom
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
- Jaroslav Pelikan
"The Jesus of Suburbia is a lie."
- Green Day
"It's true romance is dead I shot it in the chest and in the head"
- Fall Out Boy
"Don't just adore the Eucharist, enact it."
- William Cavanaugh
"If you can be talked out of your faith, you probably should be."
- Roger Ward
"Don't ever deny someone the luxury of being human or broken. That is not a luxury you yourself can afford to lose."
- Sarah Cunningham
"It is better that the United States be liquidated than that she survive by war."
- Dorothy Day
"Wherever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure vanishes from the Christian Church. With its recovery will come unexpected power."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Thursday, April 07, 2005 Why it Hurts
This whole matter of being together, this living as God's New Community: it's not hard and painful because we're doing it wrong. It hurts because it's really real. Doing this Life requires willingness to speak and to listen, to Jesus and to one another. This willingness is required for the long term. I think most Christians go through their entire lives without choosing this.
It's helpful to know that my friends and I aren't the only ones fighting this out. Bryan has some helpful reflections on his seventeen months on this journey:
It's only in good relationships that we can not only offer healthy correction but it's in the safe place of relationships that we can receive correction. Nothing replaces people sharing life together. Without relationships, we aren't living life as God would want us to. After all, He is our example.
Real Christianity involves getting together with a handful of pilgrims and becoming intimate. It means braving the possibility of communion. It means letting people into your personal space. And, by the way, these are exactly the sort of people who may hear something desperate and child-like in your voice and be experienced enough at listening to know exactly what it means.
And a reminder from +Alan, once again, that if we're going to be formed together into the image of Christ, we're going to have to sit down and be about it for a long time:
How long, how long, O Lord, does it take for us to become comfortable with each other? How long!? Here's a question for you? How long are you willing to put into it? ... When will I be fully transformed in the image of Christ? When will I stop hating my brother? When will I ever be patient in traffic on the way home!? When? Well, here's the deal on all of it. It takes a while. Those whiles depend on so many factors that if I tried to pretend I knew, I'd be legitimately full of shit. I do know this - a long time. It takes a long time for us to go from being one kind of creature to being another. So, it takes a long time for a community of faith to become what it should be. Relationships are a lifetime proposition. They are always developing and evolving, as are we - it's all very dynamic.
Kyle Potter, MTh (Oxon)
Catechist for Adult Formation,
Saint Patrick's Church
Missioner to Georgetown, Kentucky
Anglican Mission in the Americas E-mail me
Library Technician for Research Assistance & Cataloging
Department Liaison for Religion, Philosophy, Sociology & Theatre
Instructor of Christian Theology
Ensor LRC, Georgetown College
"The Church claims to be the most comprehensive human society there is - the new human race in embryo. And it claims this because of its belief that it is established not by any human process grounded in and limited by events, cultures and so on, but by God's activity." - Rowan Williams
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