Dillon Werner

“Through His death and Resurrection, Christ has restored human nature in its function as the image of God. This restoration brings about the descent of the Holy Spirit, which fills human persons in whom the image of God has been restored through baptism into Christ. It is in this way, the Holy Spirit coming to indwell the Christian, that human persons are empowered to serve as God’s image in His creation. It is through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that human persons come to participate in the working of God in the world, to do the works that He has prepared in advance for them to do (Eph. 2:10). These are God’s own works, and so God can look on them and declare them to be good. In its turn, serving as God’s image by participation brings about growth into God’s likeness (Phil. 2:12–13). It is transformative of human persons, both restoring and healing them from the effects of sin, and ever more conforming them to the likeness of Jesus Christ.”
― Stephen De Young, Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
― Plato, The Republic

“What struck me on the beach–and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow–was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in everything, in every thorn in every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas