What if we could, quite literally, have His Jesus’ life in our hands every day, to use, and think with, and work with. Isn’t it possible that, over time, that would make us better, stronger, more powerful, more holy?

If any were to create a Christian and biblical portrait of Truth Seeking, they could do no better than a picture of a group of women and men in a room, with flames upon the head of each one, flames that burned, but did not injure or consume.

Jesus knows that we sin not only when we are at our worst, but also sometimes when we are at our best, trying hardest to protect the innocent, to protect the Church, to do the right thing. We are stained even by some of our noblest efforts, and we don’t have what it takes to make the stain go away.

Failing to hit the bullseye has consequences that are more than just aesthetic. Missing the mark doesn’t just make lives that are unattractive. It makes lives that are dead, and deadly.

The same Jesus who requires impossible reconciliations becomes the reconciliation Himself. He gives what he commands, then He commands what He gives.

There were bigmouths in the Church from the start, people who dared to talk about Jesus out loud, very loud, louder than the people who were uncomfortable, louder than the people who hated them, louder than the people who killed them, loud enough to be heard by the people who finally recognized them as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Uncontaminated Christians bear in their persons, purely and only, the life of Jesus, and that makes them, by the mysterious alchemy of grace, the perfect version of themselves.

The purpose of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is ongoing conversion, the power of God to make us worthy of the promises of Christ, and witnesses to the ends of the earth. All believers can get behind that.

We are not called just to be good. We are called to be thin places, revelations – burning bushes, pillars of cloud and fire, places where people can reach out and touch the mercy of God, places where the inner life of God dwells, places where the voice of God speaks, and banishes anxiety, guilt, and fear.

Not all divisions are bad because not all divisions are born of jealousy.

Within a single lifetime after the Resurrection the Gospel of Jesus Christ was circulating in the two largest world languages of the ancient Mediterranean world and that Jesus Christ is the most well-attested historical figure from the entire ancient world – more than Homer, Plato, Aristotle or Caesar.

We can’t understand why the world is, or why it is the way it is, without considering God.

The first and most urgent task for every Christian is to reflect constantly on the person and work of Jesus – Jesus in the Bible, Jesus in the sacraments, Jesus in the liturgy, Jesus in prayer. All day, every day, Jesus.

The story of God has so formed the hours of the day, the days of the week and the weeks of the year, has so formed how to think and what to think, that all of life is a turning toward God and away from self, a turning toward God that perfects the self because the self abides, hidden in the inner life of God.

The disciples didn’t have the Bible, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit so they had to think it through, talk it through, and write it down. We have the opportunity with all those things to “get it”.

The gospel has always been about movement. Christians eventually used the Roman roads to spread across the Roman Empire. Later they would use ships to cross the sea to new lands like North America.