The Meaning of Time (Part II)

The life of Jesus Christ changed the way the people of God experience time. Jewish weekly time was rooted in six days of work leading to a Sabbath. Holy Week narrates Jesus’ fulfillment of this time. He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the first day of the week. He finished his work on Friday, the sixth day. This is the primary meaning of the words “It is finished” (John 19:30). The word “finished” is a form of the word “teleo” which is related to “telos.” On the cross, both time and the covenant were brought to their completion.

Blessed are the Peacemakers (Part III)

In Part I, we started by acknowledging the many ways we attempt to make peace without being born again to the life of God the Trinity, without seeking earnestly to enter peace in the rest of God the Father by being conformed to the likeness of Jesus the peacemaker and the Spirit the peace-giver. In Part II, we approached and considered again the Person of Jesus, He who is the peacemaker, seeking understanding of how He enables and empowers us to know the peace of God again. In this third and final essay, I think it is now possible for us to talk about what it means to be makers of peace like Him in the world.

Blessed are the Peacemakers (Part II)

As we come to terms with how we’ve attempted to create false peace, we begin to yearn for the true thing. Shalom, true peace, is the creation of God, the quality of life known by all things that walk in step with His will. We cannot make peace for ourselves. It is given, and we must receive it by the terms that it is given. We must enter into it and participate in it with a sense of humility and wonder.

Blessed are the Peacemakers (Part I)

Peace is a concept that emerges clearly in the Biblical account of Creation. The poetry of Genesis characterizes the creation of the cosmos as God making a dwelling place for Himself. Each part of the creation story involves a kind of call-and-response as God makes a place and then fills it with life, calling each of these dwellings and dwellers “good.” On the seventh day, when God takes His rest, it is meant to invoke an image that would have been common to those familiar with the architecture of an ancient temple: the god seated in the center of the temple to consecrate it and inaugurate its operation.

Obstacles to Prayer

Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray.

The Art of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the first shape salvation takes in our lives. Through confession we experience forgiveness from God and are initiated into the ministry of reconciliation. We are then sent out to practice this ministry, first in the Church and then in the world. I say ‘practice’ here to cut against the notion that forgiveness is something at which we are immediately skilled. Forgiveness is a journey, the steps of which sometimes take months or years each. But forgiveness is real and it can bring us freedom from the power of our wounds. For this to happen, though, we have to get real about those hurts we would most like to avoid. Forgiveness begins where we really need to forgive, or it does not begin at all.

A Lifetime’s Death in Love

This post is about a way to approach contemplative prayer. I freely admit from the outset that I am no master of this art of ultimate trust in God’s love for me. Almost twenty years into my journey as an Anglican and over thirty into my life as a Christian, I am still unlearning the engrained habits of self-sufficiency.

Led by a Star

When the Wise Men are called to seek the Christ Child, they are drawn forth in a strange way: by an unusually bright star, shining in the heavens. In Matthew 2 we are told, “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.’” We rarely pause to acknowledge how odd this story is.

A Beginner’s Guide to “Why God Became Man” (Part 2)

The terms of this satisfaction emerge in dire tones as Anselm’s treatise turns, in its second part, to his revelation of God’s salvation offered through Christ the God-man.

Spiritual Formation, Christian LifeFr. Hayden ButlerJanuary 11, 2025st. anselm, humanity, sin, justice

A Beginner’s Guide to “Why God Became Man” (Part 1)

Martin Thornton said of St. Anselm of Canterbury that he “occupies a place in English spirituality not unlike that of Chaucer in English letters. He is the father-founder who first brought all the essential elements together, who gave the school its clear character and stamp. In Anselm, English spiritual theology is embodied and potentially formed; formed as a young man who still needs to mature but who is no longer a child” (English Spirituality, 156). Anselm was a Benedictine monk who occupied the Archbishopric of Canterbury during the tumultuous period following the Norman Conquest at the end of the 11th Century. Like many in the English school of Catholic theology, his writings were imaginative if not always precise.

Home Alone and Keeping a Good Advent

When people ask what my favorite movie is, I always answer that I have two favorites, one of which is Home Alone. Some people think it’s kind of weird to have a Christmas movie as one of my absolute favorites, but I think it’s the best; I will watch it several times during this season. And the more I watch it, the more I see how this movie thoughtfully compares an Advent that is defined by overindulgence and materialism with an Advent characterized by penitence and reconciliation.

Celebrating the Arts

It is a gift to be able to create. As human beings, we have been given the ability to imitate our Creator by exercising and developing our creativity. God creates from the beginning, bringing out of what is formless and void, giving it design, structure, function, and purpose. We create out of what God has made and entrusted to us, ordering our little worlds after the order, or logos, by which He made the heavens and the earth.

Grief and the Christian Life

When I was eighteen, my home life and family of origin underwent a sudden change from which it never really recovered. I still remember the lurch of what I thought was permanent and untouchable suddenly shifting under my feet. Like Lewis, I felt afraid. I felt cut off, even when surrounded by people. I felt deaf to the words they were trying to say to make me feel better, and even when their words got through, part of me still wanted their kind words to just go away. Yet I was terrified of being alone. Starting to sound familiar?

The Rash Passion of St. Peter

Last weekend, we celebrated the feast day of St. Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus said, in Matthew 16:18-9, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah … you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Before these prophetic words came true, though, St. Peter had to face Gethsemane.

Spiritual Formation, Church HistoryAlea PeisterJuly 6, 2024saint days

The Artist as a Channel of God's Charity

Today, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist. This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.

Spiritual Formation, Theology, Christian LifeAlea PeisterJune 15, 2024art, creativity

Offering Tomorrow

There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘anxiety.’ Like all words that get used casually and frequently, there comes a point when we need to redraw some definitions. Anxiety is a word that likely comes from a very old word meaning “to choke.” It describes the sensation of having one’s breath cut off–and the panic that results from the sensation. In more recent use, anxiety refers to a clinical psychological diagnosis referring to a spectrum of nervous conditions arising from a spectrum of causes ranging from heredity to traumatic experience. In popular use, it is often used as a synonym for ‘worry,’ when concern for the uncertain outcome of an event becomes distracting to the point of interrupting our lives.

Christian Life, Spiritual FormationFr. Hayden ButlerApril 13, 2024anxiety, control, surrender

The Final Christian Battle

It is very easy to view our growth during the season of Lent in the short term. By this point in the Lenten fast we have a good awareness of our own discomfort. Whether or not we chose our disciplines well, at a certain point we very much look forward to the Easter season. As Easter approaches, a healthy way to reflect on this past season is to determine which practices can be carried forward in our spiritual life. We should be evaluating our life of prayer. Have we grown in daily recollection? Are we attending to our life within the community of our parish? Have we prepared to meet the Easter season taking that hope back into our lives? However, although these questions are important, they are primarily focused on short-term growth.

Who Will Wake Me Up?

One of the great gifts of being a priest is being able to have frequent, good conversations with children in the parish. Their questions are my favorite because they come from an unpretentious—and often unrelenting—sense of curiosity. But one must be cautious. Their occasional and developmentally appropriate tendency to pepper adults with questions proves disarming until, all of the sudden, they ask something so central to the human heart and the life of faith that we can only be halted. For those who’ve been given the privilege of teaching children, our role is always to be ready for these moments. They can and do have the potential to make a life-long impact and much depends on what we are prepared to say when the opportunity arrives.

Losing the Way

Since last year, Timothy Lawrence and I adopted the tradition to read and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy throughout the Lenten fast. This reading course was outlined by Fr. Hayden a few years prior for his students at Pacifica. As if enduring the silence and temptations of Lent are not enough, adding a medieval poetry epic about the 9 circles of hell, 7 levels of purgatory, and 9 spheres of heaven to that is a good penance. During the first few chapters, there is an emphasis on losing the way. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Lent reveals much about ourselves. Our fears. Our worries. Our anxiety.

Sunday is Non-Transferable

It sometimes surprises new practitioners of Lenten disciplines when they do the math and find that there are not forty but forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. How do we account for the additional days? It is then that they learn of Sunday as a blessed relaxation of the Fast in observance of our weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Day of Resurrection. The Lenten Sunday puts a point on what is true of every Sunday: it is both a looking back and a looking forward. It is a perpetual memorial of Easter until Christ returns to raise and judge the quick and the dead.

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