On Unity in Messiah

“Because there is one bread we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). On the surface, the singleness of the bread seems to ground the unity of the body. And yet the one bread stands for the crucified body of Jesus Christ, the body that has refused to remain a self-enclosed singularity, but has opened itself up so that others can freely partake of it. The single personal will and the single impersonal principle or law-two variations of the transcendent “One”-enforce unity by suppressing and subsuming the difference; the crucified Messiah creates unity by giving his own self. Far from being the assertion of the one against many, the cross is the self-giving of the one for many. Unity here is not the result of “sacred violence” which obliterates the particularity of “bodies,” but a fruit of Christ's self-sacrifice, which breaks down the enmity between them. From a Pauline perspective, the wall that divides is not so much” the difference” as enmity (d. Ephesians 2:14)."

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (p. 47)

On Temptation, Spiritual Warfare and Victory

"The Elder Moses, who dwelt in Petra, was at one time sorely harried by lust: when he could no longer endure to hold himself in his cell, he set out to tell it to the elder Isadore: The latter asked him to return to his cell. But Moses did not consent, saying, 'I cannot, Father.' And Isadore took Moses and brought him into the house. And he said to him, 'Look at the sunset.' And Moses looked, and saw a multitude of demons: and they were in commotion, and rousing themselves to battle. And again, the elder Isadore said, 'Look to the East.' And he looked, and saw an innumerable multitude of angels in glory. Whereupon the elder Isadore said, 'Behold, these are they that are sent to our aid: those that are climbing up in the west are they that fight against us: and they that are with us are more than they that be against us.' And the elder Moses thanksed God and took courage, and returned to his cell." --Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Vitae Patrum) 18.12

Al-Ghazali on the Shame of Hell

"Suppose a certain king had been celebrating his son's marriage. In the evening the young man goes off with some companions and presently returns to the palace (as he thinks) intoxicated. He enters a chamber where a light is burning and lies down, as he supposes, by his bride. In the morning, when soberness returns, he is aghast to find himself in a mortuary of fire-worshipers [by which he means Zoroastrians], his couch a bier, and the form which he mistook for that of his bride the corpse of an old woman beginning to decay. On emerging from the mortuary with his garments all soiled, what is his shame to see his father, the king, approaching a retinue of soldiers! Such is a feeble picture of the shame those will feel in the next world who in this have greedily abandoned themselves to what they thought were delights."

--Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, ch. 4

An Incarnation Metaphor for Christmas Eve

"There is a drama in which a King, desiring to win the love of a simple country shepherd girl, appears to her as an ordinary shepherd youth. In this form, she can understand him and talk to him. He speaks of the King of the country as if he were someone else. Finally the shepherd youth weds her in royal pomp and brings her to the palace. Then, to her surprise, the shepherd girl realises that he whom she loved as a shepherd youth is the King himself; the shepherd and the King are one, and her lover makes her a queen." --Dhanjibhai Fakirbhai, Khristopanishad

On Mysticism and Critical Realism

"Again, it seems to me that a critical realism, which found room for the duality of our full human experience--the Eternal and the Successive, supernatural and natural reality--would provide a better philosophic background to the experience of the mystics than the vitalism which appeared, twenty years ago, to offer so promising a way of escape from scientific determinism. Determinism--more and more abandoned by its old friends the physicists--is no longer the chief enemy to such a spiritual interpretation of life as is required by the experience of the mystics. It is rather a naturalistic monism, a shallow doctrine of immanence unbalanced by any adequate sense of transcendance, which now threatens to re-model theology in a sense which leaves no room for the noblest and purest reaches of the spiritual life."

Evelyn Underwood, Preface to the 12th edition of Mysticism, 1930, viii.

On Prayer and Works

"And the most deplorable thing of all is that the vain wisdom of the world compels them to apply the human standard to the divine. Many people reason quite the wrong way about prayer, thinking that good actions and all sorts of preliminary measures render us capable of prayer. But quite the reverse is the case; it is prayer which bears fruit in good works and all the virtues."

--The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 7

On Religion, Properly Understood

"Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man."

Muhammad Iqbal