A Child Is Born For Us This Night

All our vulnerability embodied
in so compact a time and space,
a child is born for us this night —
for the twisted tongue and limb,
and the harrowed heart and soul,
for the nameless none have marked,
and the countless come to pass —
born to sinew faith, hope, love
from dark to light, death to life,
this passion laid to earth, for us.

No More Can We Merit Salvation

No more can we merit salvation than we can merit creation. Doing, on our part, cannot generate being, for ourselves, whether in creation or in salvation. For us, being ontologically precedes doing, in creation and in re-creation. Grace preceded, grounded, and stamped created being in once-pristine existence; afterward, in now-sullied existence, grace again precedes, grounds, and stamps re-created being. We receive both first being in creation and second being in re-creation. Hence, engendered in and by grace, which we accept and take up by faith, when first made and then re-made by God, in living well or doing good we act in and from thanks and praise. Living well or doing good was always, is now, and ever will be that which proceeds from and expresses our being and "re-being" in God, never that which has any virtue to achieve either existence. We live because God first "lived" us. Then, we love because God first loved us.

Ecclesiology, Grace, and Redemption

Whatever we understand the church to be, that is our understanding of the nature and means of grace and redemption. Whatever we understand the nature and means of grace and redemption to be, that is our understanding of the problem at the core of human existence.

God is First the Answer to Our Being

"Revelation is not mere information. Revelation is God disclosing his intimate self to us as a lover to his beloved." Ruth Burrows, OCD, in Love Unknown. || God is not first the solution or answer to the truth. God is not first the solution to the good. God is not first the answer to the beautiful. God is first the solution or answer to being. And being is not abstract, not monistic, not quality-less. Being is irreducibly personal and intrinsically relational: the triune God. Hence, God is first the answer to our being, and that is why our rebellion against and repudiation of God, of our relationship with God, lead to untruth, sin, and chaos, and ultimately to death. God in and through Christ restores our being -- personal relationship with God -- and in and through the Holy Spirit nurtures that relationship such that truth, goodness, and beauty fruit in and from us.

The Disordering and Healing of Love

God is love. Hence, love is good. Yet, in our sin, we often turn love from a good to a wrong. How does love become disordered in us? We love that which we ought not love. And where we love what we ought, we love in ways we ought not. At the very core of our being then, where what ought to be most good goes most wrong, we need the cruciform grace of salvation, of healing, to order love rightly, as God is love.