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[holabrody]

”The Church becomes, in this view, the people who recieve the Word/Christ, a people of faith, a dawn-people. Luther also calls this people ’the Gospel’s new creation’ whom the present Christ now gathers and forms in concealment and which he will give to the Father at the end of time.”

- Bishop Carl Axel Aurelius, Gothenburg Emeritus

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“It is truly meet to bless you, O Theotokos, ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim, without defilement you gave birth to God the Word. True Theotokos we magnify you!”

- Hymn to the Theotokos

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“In [the silence of contemplative prayer]…the Father speaks to us his incarnate Word, who suffered, died, and rose; in this silence the Spirit of adoption enables us to share in the prayer of Jesus.”

- Catechism of the Catholic Church 2717

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“The liturgy is the prayer of the whole Christ, head and members, addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit. As members of the Body of Christ, we pray the liturgy in and with the Church…God is the origin and end of our prayer.

By the daily celebration of the liturgy, we praise God for [the] gift of life and for the even more wonderful gift of friendship with [God], who willed that all [people] should become [God’s] children. Celebrating the liturgy with care draws us into the dynamism of creation, which glorifies God by the beauty it has received from [God]. The great attention to beauty in all things that typifies monks is rooted in the liturgy.”

- The Monks of Solesmes

[holabrody]

“…when we were still far off you met us in your Son and brought us home. Dying and living, he declared your love, gave us grace, and opened the gate of glory.”

- Prayer After Communion, Holy Communion Order One, Common Worship

[holabrody]

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, [humanity] will have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

[holabrody]

“We must beware of any attempt to brandish Christianity void of the message and presence of the Wounded and Risen One. Any presentation of Christianity that abstracts the scandal of the Cross or perversely uses the Cross as a weapon with which to strike others is veering towards heresy or even blasphemy.

“So we must remain resolutely Christocentric and resolutely committed to following Christ and to apply his commandments, as well as his promises — first of all to ourselves. And beware of too much rhetoric, beware of too many words and consider how people live.

“Ultimately, that is how Christianity spread and that is how Christianity renewed a weary world in late antiquity. By all means, there was an element of preaching and teaching and catechesis. But what bowled people over and turned societies round was seeing a new way of being human, and a new way of creating and fostering community, seeing and recognizing the possibility of reconciliation, of forgiveness, and of building a society, a new city, on the basis of reconciliation and forgiveness. 

“And so when Christianity is invoked as a component of what is ultimately hate speech, we’ve just got to not jump on the train.” - Bishop Erik Varden

[holabrody]

“In this loaf of bread you are given clearly to understand how much you should love unity. I mean, was that loaf made from one grain? Weren't there many grains of wheat? But before they came into the loaf they were all separate; they were joined together by means of water after a certain amount of pounding and crushing.

Unless wheat is ground, after all, and moistened with water, it can't possibly get into this shape which is called bread. In the same way you too were being ground and pounded, as it were, by the humiliation of fasting and the sacrament of exorcism.

Then came baptism, and you were, in a manner of speaking, moistened with water in order to be shaped into bread. But it's not yet bread without fire to bake it. So what does fire represent? That's the chrism, the anointing. Oil, the fire-feeder, you see, is the sacrament of the Holy Spirit.” - St Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 227

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“The disciples only see, they only behold. A far greater intimacy is granted to Thomas, a more corporeal intimacy than the head of the beloved disciple resting on Jesus's breast. It is again a suggestively mythologized intimacy - thrusting into the side of the second Adam from which the new Eve issues. Caravaggio captures the eroticism of that action, its carnality, its penetration.” - Graham G. Ward

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The body isn’t a prison cell from which the soul escapes. It’s the site of redemption.

This has political implications that we’ve barely begun to think through. The body is always somewhere. Bodies are particular, located, embedded in a specific place and a specific web of obligations. When Christianity announces that the body matters—that God took one on, kept it, and raised it—it’s declaring that the local, the specific, and the incarnate aren’t obstacles to the spiritual life. They are its ordinary form. The parish, the neighborhood, the local economy, the particular watershed—these aren’t sentimental attachments to be outgrown. They’re the geography of love.” - Mark Clavier

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“She did not mistake in taking him for a gardener; though she might seem to err in some sense, yet in some other she was in the right. For in a sense, and a good sense, Christ may well be said to be a gardener, and indeed is one. For our rule is, Christ as He appears, so He is ever; no false semblant in Him…[Christ] gardens our souls too, and makes them, as the prophet saith, like a well-watered garden; weeds out of them whatsoever is noisome or unsavoury, sows and plants them with true roots and seeds of righteousness, waters them with the dew of his grace, and makes them bring forth fruit to eternal life.” - Lancelot Andrewes, Easter 1620 Sermon, Whitehall

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“We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution; each of us is the result of a thought of God, each of us of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” - Pope Benedict XVI

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“At this moment, both sad and joyful, providentially bathed in the light of Easter, I would like all of us to see the passing of our beloved Holy Father Pope Francis and the Conclave as a paschal event, a stage in that long exodus through which the Lord continues to guide us towards the fullness of life. In this perspective, we entrust to the ‘merciful Father and God of all consolation’ (2 Cor 1:3) the soul of the late Pontiff and also the future of the Church.” - Pope Leo XIV’s First Address to the College of Cardinals on May 10, 2025

[holabrody]

“The Church becomes, in this view, the people who receive the Word/Christ, a people of faith, a dawn-people. Luther also calls this people ’the Gospel’s new creation’ whom the present Christ now mysteriously gathers and forms and which he will give to the Father at the end of time.” - Bishop Carl Axel Aurelius

[holabrody]

“The risk of prayer is to allow what already is to come to perceptible birth in us without any attempt on our part to conform this process to our expectation or our supposed need…What already is in us is Christ and that Christ in us is eternally moving towards the Father who is eternal Source…Our natural place as human beings is in this movement of love. But for our own journey to arrive at this destination in union with the movement of the Son to the Father, we must be detached from our adherence to the securities of the world in which the ego has to be defended against any loss of status because its solidity and worth depend on its place in an overall system of values that can…be bargained over.”

- Rowan Williams at the Pontifical Faculty of St Teresa of the Child Jesus in Rome on “St Teresa and the Risk of the Contemplative Life” https://youtu.be/zYkE9til0Vo?si=Uj7YbHEEZy5wa694

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“At Mattins bound, At Prime reviled, Condemned to death at Terce, Nailed to the Cross at Sext, At None his blessed side they pierce, They take him down at Evensong, In grave at Compline lay; Who henceforth bids his Church observe These sevenfold hours alway.”

- From a medieval book of hours

[holabrody]

“When we were still far off you met us in your Son and brought us home. Dying and living you declared your love and opened the gate of glory.”