Claiming an
Easter Faith

All life is change. And to be perfect is to have changed often.

John Cardinal Newman

Seeds are pellets of energy and protein. From one little seed emerges something as perfect as an orchid, as vast as a sequoia, as persistent as a dandelion, as patient as a desert wildflower, as gentle as a blade of grass, as all embracing as a weeping willow, as joyful as a daisy. The church needs more seeds; more women and men with what Thoreau called "the seed of life in them."

Contemporary church leaders will see the potential for churches to become seminaries (a piece of ground where seeds are sown) schools of the Spirit, where members do not receive maps so much as navigational skills, the texts and traditions of the faith. The challenge of the church in the twenty first century is to become for its people a "seminary," a seedbed in which the texts and the traditions of the faith recreate themselves in and through the body until its molecular imagination is awakened by a living God.

The message of Jesus is so profound that the world is still deciphering it, thousands of years later. God's purposes are veiled and understood only "in the fullness of time." Truth often unfolds as slowly as a symphony. A note struck early on might be picked up much later and developed fully even later than that. The music of truth may take centuries to play itself out. Not all of God's communications are released overnight.

Scripture is more than God's history, or the church's story, or the clergy's doctrines, or an individual's principles to live by. it is a journey into the holy. It is the opening of a transcendent consciousness that leaks fresh outpourings of the divine.

All truth ends in mystery. The Enlightenment, which emphasized more the mastery than the mystery of nature, never realized that God leaves more fingerprints than blueprints. God has a particular liking for the magical and mystical. Magic, once a friend of faith, then a rival church, became an antichurch in the modern world. In its degraded modernistic sense, magic means deceptive, neo-pagan sleight of hand ritual. But magic in its deepest, truest sense, means the presence of the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the mortal, the wondrous in the common....God works mysteriously, anonymously, unpredictably, magically.

Leonard Sweet

To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.

Louis Pasteur

When I pray, coincidences start to happen. When I don't pray, they don't happen.

William Temple

I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness ... much like a man who out of his whole bodily organism, should get into the habit of using and moving only his little finger. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon of which we do not dream.

William James

Nature is full of infinite possibilities that have never been realized.

Leonardo Da Vinci

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