God’s Love for Us and Our Doubts

“The crux of their ‘courage and optimism’ was to make the body the center of their attention, turning their back on the Greek notion that the soul is the essence of personhood. Not so, the medieval held: it is the body … And we do desire it, sensibly or not so sensibly. Having been given the vision of a God whose care for us is so heartbrokenly thorough that he became one of us, suffering what we suffer, dying as we do, to show us that even what we fear most has been conquered by a love we are called to show one another, we can’t help but hope that it is true and try to stake our lives on that hope. Our faith tells us that we have been baptized into Christ’s death and the hope of resurrection. ‘For you have died,’ Colossians tells us, ‘and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory’ (3:3-4). This is the risen Christ who asked Mary not to cling to him, who showed Thomas wounds received on our side of death, and who made breakfast for his friends at the edge of the sea. And if we find this hard to believe, let us hope that our doubt has something in common with that of the apostles when they encountered the risen Christ: ‘While they still disbelieved for joy and wondered, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”’ (Luke 24:41)”  (John Garvey, Death and the Rest of Our Life, pg. 87-88)

The Only Thing that Counts is a New Creation

“The only thing that counts is a new creation,” so said St. Paul in Galatians 6:15.

“There are two creations: the first by which we were made, and the second one, by which were redeemed … Because that old creation had been ruined and blotted out by sin, there had to be a new creation in Christ … For this new creation Christ led the way, being called the first-born, for indeed He was the first-fruits of all men, of those who are begotten unto life, and those who, though dead, were given life through His resurrection.” (St. Gregory of Nyssa, FROM GLORY TO GLORY, PG. 66)