Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
Much refreshed from my hiatus from the thread, and I wish you all well. I'll pop in occasionally. :)
About 5 years ago there was a conference among conservative Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox. I'm reading a book about it, called "Reclaiming the Great Tradition." Couple of great quotes from the introduction seem appropriate for the discussion:
The words “ecumenical” and “traditional” were to be seen in a certain sense as in tension, concern for the former having so often gone hand in hand with a neglect of the latter. In fact someone suggested early in the planning that our slogan should be “Let all the antiecumenical forces of the Christian world unite!”
Father Richard John Neuhaus captured the spirit of our thinking in the opening address when he observed that in many cases “our unity in the truth is more evident in our quarreling about the truth than in our settling for something less than the truth..”
CS Lewis writes, “It is at her center, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”
The person who is struggling to love God with his entire heart, soul and mind, who is intent on following the shortest path to this center, simply does not have the time to consider other paths than his own. And when he is forced to, when the presence of other paths can no longer be ignored, often the only way to keep them from interfering with his focus on Christ is to reject them as errors…The only alternative in such a case is indifference, and indifference means spiritual death. It is with good reason that we put blinders on a horse if we mean for it to plow a straight row…We need to be careful that our busyness around the ecumenical household does not distract us, like Martha, from “the one thing…needful” (Lk 10:42).
Christ makes it clear that the interiority of real Christian union is not the same as the inwardness of pious feeling or tolerant sentiment. True unity will come instead only in the interior of God himself and to the measure that we are drawn into his trinitarian life.
Trying to get in a little early celebrating, I see. :-)