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A Life of Luminous Actions

Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, October 29, 2017 Mystics like De Chardin believed that the luminous heart of Christ is the center of the cosmos. We agree, of course. Professor Jaroslav Pelikan said that the problem with modern theology is that it has lost sight of the Cosmic Christ. True Christianity always rests in the revelation that Christ is Forever and All-Encompassing. The reason we have forgotten him, I believe, is encapsulated

The Thirty-Seventh Day of Christmas Advent: Incarnation to Parousia

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2009 Celebration of Christmas, the Nativity of our Lord, invites us to look in a fresh way at the intimate relation that exists between the Incarnation of Christ and his “Second Coming” in glory. Too often Nativity is taken as a feast in and of itself, a family festival so deformed by the season’s commercial pressures that two of its major emphases, cosmic and eschatological, become lost in a

The Apostle Paul. Paul’s Conversion Experience

All of Paul’s major themes are contained in seed form in his conversion experience, of which there are three descriptions in Acts written by Luke (chapters 9, 22, and 26). Paul’s own account is in the first chapter of Galatians: “The Gospel which I preach . . . came through the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:11-12). Paul never doubts this revelation. The Christ that he met was not the Christ in the flesh (Jesus); it

Divinization

If we could glimpse the panoramic view of the biblical revelation and the Big Picture that we’re a part of, we’d see how God is forever evolving human consciousness, making us ever more ready for God. The Jewish prophets and many Catholic and Sufi mystics used words like espousal, marriage, or bride and groom to describe this phenomenon. That’s what the prophet Isaiah (61:10, 62:5), many of the Psalms, the school of Paul (Ephesians 5:25-32),

From Image to Likeness (Part II)

In the Mother of God, the first created person who has entered the resplendence of the Kingdom in her earthly flesh, we see the two mysteries conjoined: that of the image restored in Christ and that of the likeness achieved by the Spirit and freedom. Nicholas Cabasilas said that God, as long as he had not found a mother, was like a king in exile, like a stranger without a city. Solely because a young