An American fifth-grader once wrote to C.S. Lewis asking if it were possible to visit Narnia. Lewis replied that the only way, as far as he knew, was through death. But then he added a curious qualifier: “Perhaps some very good people get just a tiny glimpse before then.”
This week, a guest editorial by Arthur Enns, a retired pastor and former healthcare administrator, who is writing a book on the sovereignty of God. Here is his reflection on the timely topic of “Sovereignty and Racism.”
The last two verses of the Book of Job tell us that after his ordeal, “Job lived 140 years. And so he died, old and full of years.”
Lately I’ve been savoring Thomas Traherne’s book Centuries of Meditations, in a wonderful contemporary edition by David Buresh called Waking Up in Heaven. I heartily agree with what C.S. Lewis wrote about this book, calling it “almost the most beautiful book in the English language. I could go on quoting from it forever.”
On July 20, 1969, the first man landed on the moon. One spring morning about the year A.D. 33 the first New Man landed on the earth. His spaceship was a tomb, and He left His pressurized linen suit inside and walked out into a garden.
This prayer seems appropriate as we approach Good Friday in the midst of a pandemic. It was composed by Marguerite Teilhard de Chardin, a former President of the Catholic Union of the Sick, and sister of the well-known writer, Pierre.
What follows is a chapter I originally wrote for my book Practicing the Presence of People, but decided at the last minute to drop. Perhaps I felt, at that point in my life, that it was too personal to publish. But now here it is.
Far in the future, a spaceship from Earth approaches a white dwarf star surrounded by clouds of gas from the time it went supernova. On board the ship are scientists, including a Jesuit astrophysicist, sent to investigate the reasons behind the supernova explosion.
On Christmas Eve, 1513, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, a Franciscan friar, wrote the following beautiful letter—what we’d now consider a Christmas card—to his friend and patron Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi:
Advent is a season short in duration but long in distance. It is the journey of a soul from Nazareth to Bethlehem—a mere hundred miles, yet really the span from here to eternity.