Elizabeth

“The Bible warns time and again against the fallacy that holds that I can be close to God without being close to God’s people. It condemns any sort of God-and-me spirituality that does not result in an outpouring of love toward others: (Is. 58:5-7).”
― Mark E. Thibodeaux, Armchair Mystic: Easing Into Contemplative Prayer

“It is a necessary part of a rule of life to cherish our bodies, care for them, and see the beauty in their intricate design. But too often, most of us - men and women both - come to dislike them as the years pass, or at the very least to feel that they need major remodeling... We fight to stave off aging or at least to disguise it. Yet in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds us of the sanctity of the body (1 Cor. 6:19-20)...”
― Margaret Guenther, At Home in the World: A Rule of Life for the Rest of Us

“What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters—as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed'—is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize—namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all?”
― Wesley Hill

“Our bodies are the means of providing our souls access to God in his revelation: eat this book. A friend reports to me that one of the early rabbis selected a different part of our bodies to make the same point; he insisted that the primary body part for taking in the word of God is not the ears but the feet. You learn God, he said, not through your ears but through your feet: follow the Rabbi.”
― Eugene H. Peterson