"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
“Yes, the Church is made up of sinners; in fact, it is a hospital for sinners and often looks and smells like a hospital, with ill patients, raw wounds, and disease on every side. Such things bother us and make us uncomfortable, but where else are the wounded and dying to go? They would pass out and die in the desert alongside the dusty trails” – Jeff Cavins, “I’m not being fed!”
In the past I’ve attended non-Catholic churches and heard things like “We don’t do liturgy“. The funny thing was that when I came back the following week the service was exactly the same. It was identical the next week…and also the week after that… Things happened pretty much like clockwork.
The truth is that they did have liturgy, it was just their liturgy…
I came across this 1993 broadcast of something Paul Harvey wrote in the 60’s:
Thanks to Mommy Life for the link.
For the last few weeks I’ve had Ezekiel 37 stuck in my head:
[The Lord] set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” – Ezekiel 37:1-3
The Lord then tells Ezekiel to speak to the dry bones and say:
“I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life…” – Ezekiel 37:5-6
We are then told that “there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them”. The Lord then commands Ezekiel to speak again, saying:
“Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live” – Ezekiel 37:9
Breath enters them, they come to life, “a vast army”…