A love which cannot be denied?

First Timothy declares that God "desires all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." Is it possible that God's purpose will be thwarted? And what might that say about whether God is truly God? Will the sovereignty of God in Christ be forever in dispute?
Admittedly, these are heavy questions. Christians have been debating them for centuries, and we will not here resolve them to everyone's satisfaction, not even to our own. But stay with them for a while, for these questions lead into the mystery of a love that searched out and found such an unlikely soul as Dysmas. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


I have always rejected the position of apocatastasis until I heard Fr. Neuhaus' explanation in support of it, and even after having done so I can only manage to hope for the sake of my fellow sojourners that it might be true.

It is enough for me to know that God desires in his love for us that we be saved, and to respond to that love by returning it and sharing it as I am led.

Fooling Yourself

"All that matters is that I do my part."

Well, that's certainly what I've needed to focus on, and it still is. Still, by pretending that I didn't need to be concerned about anything else, I've simply kicked the can down the road.  But I probably wasn't ready to pick it up and take care of it until now, anyway, so maybe that's for the best, too.

Neurons at night

Sometimes, maybe often, our dreams don't mean anything, and yet can be so odd or have such timing as to stay with us.

I don't know who the woman was on the other side of the "court;" it didn't appear to be anyone I know in real life.  I'm not sure what was at stake to seem so critical, or why the invitation to hit a few tennis balls to settle it - yes, I conceded, I'd played a little when I was younger - made sense.  Suddenly, we weren't on the tennis court we'd just been sitting by, but we were in a department store. Instead of a standard net, there were a pair of six-foot high screened panels, separated by a couple feet, that I had to serve over.  I double faulted when the second bottle of nail polish (?) I hit didn't clear the second fence.  In another of those dreamish inconguities, this serve was from the ad court, yet made the score love-15. I walked through the "door" cut into the panels to inspect the obstacle I was serving over the top of.  I won the next two points, so was up 30-15 (having just won a service point from the deuce side, as was proper), and starting to feel confident.  Now having just served a tennis ball, I walked through the fences to inspect which line of linoleum floor tiles my second serve bounced on. A group of customers verified it had landed wide, so I was down 30-40 (again having served from the correct side), and was beginning to feel more than slightly nervous about losing whatever was at stake.  I began to hear gently increasing, soothing and familiar strain of music through the PA speakers in the ceiling, and realized it was a little brighter in the room.

The daily alarm on my cell phone was going off.

I'll never know what was going to come next.

What if that really is more important to you?

Today's word

felicitate - 1. to consider happy or fortunate. 2. to offer congratulations to

I've heard the phrase, "Greetings and felicitations," but never paid much attention to what the second half of it meant.

Get back?

If we say that this way of atonement is wrong, we are back in the garden presuming to name right and wrong, good and evil. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


Our associate pastor, Fr. Satish, gave a really wonderful homily tying together today's three readings from Mass, and they're not exactly related to this thought from Fr. Neuhaus, yet they are.

Fr. Neuhaus has addressed the difficulty some have with the Father demanding the sacrifice of the Son in order to redeem humanity.  I recall the scripture passage that Jesus quotes in Matthew 9, 13: I require mercy, not sacrifice.  Jesus did not die on the cross to satisfy a vengeful God who required it of him. Rather He gave himself freely to this plan of salvation in mercy and love, embraced it as he left the throne of glory to become one of us.  As God did not ultimately demand the sacrifice of Isaac, he accepts - rather than demands - the sacrifice of his son for our redemption.

We insist on naming right and wrong, good and evil, for ourselves.  Perhaps if we stop being so defensive of our own ideas we might find the grace of God more easily and less offensive to us.

An unplanned break

Wow. Three consecutive days with no blog entries. Between work and the Birds, I need to be careful not to get derailed. Not writing isn't itself a problem. Not having read anything that was worth stopping what I was doing right away to write about is a different matter entirely.

Now, it isn't as if I've written nothing at all in those three days.  I did take a little time to start working on something very important.