Prominent in the writings of Maximus the Confessor is his thought on cosmology--in effect, why God created the cosmos--and eschatology--what will really happen to us and to the non-human physical world at the end of time.  Maximus foresees, not only universal bodily resurrection for all humans, but a glorious restoration of the created cosmos in which deified humanity will serve as the channels through which the divine energies will be transmitted to the universe.  In this way humanity will serve as "priests of the cosmos".

In this article Jesse Dominick provides an excellent summation of what Maximus has to say on these topics.

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Conversely, if man is a microcosm, then for St. Maximus the universe is a makranthropos—a man distended, and so the universe can be contemplated as a man. St. Maximus states in his work The Church’s Mystagogy that “the whole world, made up of visible and invisible things, is man and conversely that man made up of body and soul is a world ... intelligible things display the meaning of the soul, as the soul does that of intelligible things, and that sensible things display the place of the body as the body does that of sensible things.”[10] As body and soul constitutes but one man, so the visible and invisible aspects of the universe constitute but one cosmos. As Lars Thunberg explains, this relationship between man and the universe does not remain static, but takes on a dynamic element—“the duality should be transformed into a unity, unthreatened by dissolution. This task of unification is attributed to man as microcosm and mediator.”[11] For St. Maximus, the fact that man is a microcosm suggests and naturally leads to this vocation as mediator, in which man “[recapitulates] in himself the elements of the entire world, in his body and in his soul.”[12] Ambiguum 41, as well as chapters 5 and 7 of The Church’s Mystagogy is relevant for the outlining of this active role of mediating. This role of mediation and unification, of uniting diversity, with all diversity preserved, is a consequence of man’s bearing the image of God, and of man’s personal relationship with God.

Hesychasm, the spiritual underpinning of Eastern Orthodox spirituality,  based upon the frequent repetition of the Jesus Prayer, seeks to instill in its practitioners a strong sense of inner stillness, leading to silent, imageless contemplation.  Does this mean navel-gazing on a mountaintop?  Far from it.  Orthodox writer Philip Sherrard has some incisive observations on the relevance of hesychasm to the so-called "real world".  His essay "The Revival of Hesychast Spirituality" appears in Louis Dupre' and  Don E Saliers, eds, Christian Spirituality:  Post-Reformation and Modern, Crossroad 1996.  The excerpt below appears on p 428.

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Hesychasm by no means scorns or undervalues human love and service.  It is emphatically not "otherworldly" as this term is usually understood.  On the contrary it insists, as we have seen, that the whole of creation is impregnated with God's own life and being and that consequently there can be no true love of God that does not embrace every aspect of creation, however humble and limited.  Its purpose is not to abandon the world to annihilation and self-destruction, but to redeem it.

It is to redeem it by transfiguring it.  But for the hesychast this transfiguration presupposes the transformation of human consciousness itself, so that it becomes capable of perceiving the divinity that lies at the heart of every created form, giving each such form its divine purpose and determining its intrinsic vocation and beauty.  In other words, hesychasts will consider that the way for them, as for any other person, best to serve, at least initially, fellow humans and all other created beings, will be to bring the love and knowledge of God to birth within themselves; for until that has been achieved, their outward actions, instead of being the necessary expression of this love and knowledge, will be tarnished both with self-love and with the idolatry of which we have spoken.  This will make it clear why hesychasm is and must be first of all a way of contemplation.  For it is only through the contemplative life in all its aspects--ascetic watchfulness, prayer, meditation, the whole uninterrupted practice of the presence of God to which the Philokalia is the guide--that humans can actualize in themselves the personal love and knowledge of God on which depend not only their own authentic existence as human beings but also their capacity to cooperate with God in fulfilling the innermost purposes of creation.

In recent years walking the labyrinth has become a significant spiritual practice for many people, both Christian and non-Christian.  In pre-Christian Europe labyrinths appear in Neolithic and, later, Celtic cultural contexts.  At some point they were "baptized" by the church and incorporated as an element of contemplative spiritual practice.  They may be found in a number of medieval cathedrals; probably the most famous, serving as the model for many modern recreations, is the one from Chartres cathedral, pictured above.

When I walk the labyrinth, I feel as if it is a recapitulation of my own journey on the contemplative path, one that is probably common to many people.  When you begin the journey, there is an initial flush of enthusiasm, so that you get close to the center--where God is present in a perceivable way--without quite reaching it.  Then you are pulled away and spend time enduring long stretches where the whole business seems an act of futility.  With patience, you eventually reach the center, however briefly.  But you are not meant to stay there for good--in this life, anyway--and so you retrace your steps to return to the "real" world, hopefully refreshed and nourished spiritually.  I usually recite the Jesus Prayer as I walk the labyrinth.

A good article on the labyrinth, albeit from a largely secular perspective, may be found on the always-interesting Aeon website.

 Norman Russell, in his book Fellow Workers with God:  Orthodox thinking on theosis (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2009) discusses how the Transfiguration of Jesus is a theophany, or manifestation of God.  The excerpt appears on pp 102-104.

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"What does it mean, 'he was transfigured'?  It means he allowed a brief glimpse of the Godhead and showed them the indwelling God."  This text from St John Chrysostom..., which later Fathers, including St Gregory Palamas, liked to quote, sums up the single most important aspect of the Transfiguration.  "There is no other place in the entire Bible," as Andreopoulos observes, "where the curtain between the material and the invisible world is completely lifted visually, and there is no other place where the divinity of Christ is witnessed in such a dramatic way"...

The vision of the transfigured Christ, in St Maximus' understanding, implies an internal change in those who seek spiritual knowledge.  There is a progression, he says, from the beginners' stage, in which Christ appears in the form of a servant..., to the advanced stage of those who have climbed the high mountain of prayer, in which Christ appears in the form of God....This manifestation of Christ in his divine nature is not experienced as something external to ourselves.  It is interiorized through the life of faith...

In the Gerontikon, the sayings and stories of the desert Fathers...we find several accounts of monks transfigured with light.  Three of them stand out:  Abba Pambo, "whose face shone like lightening", Abba Sisoes, of whom it was said that "when he was about to die, with the fathers sitting near him, his face shone like the sun," and Abba Silvanus, who was seen "with his face and body shining like an angel".  These texts have been studied with deep insight by Stelios Ramfos, who sees them as presenting us with an image of what it is to be truly human.  Pambo, Sisoes and Silvanus were men whose radiance was the product of inward openness.  In Ramfos' view, Pambo's "if you have a heart, you can be saved," is one of the most important sayings in the Gerontikon.  For the heart in this sense is the spiritual expression of the embodied person.  It is the meeting-place of God within us.  It is where we find freedom of speech before God.  The pure in heart see God, and they become pure in heart through thanksgiving.  It is thanksgiving which enables us to see God, not liberation from the body or the subjugation of the will.  When the heart is filled with thanksgiving, egoism disappears.  And when we are free from egoism, we share in the self-emptying of Christ.  It is only by sharing in the naked humiliated Christ (the kenosis of his divinity) that we can come to share in the glorified Christ (the theosis of his humanity).

Theosis, deification, partaking in the Divine Nature, call it what you will--is generally considered to be an Eastern Orthodox concept.  Indeed, it is arguably the distinctive underpinning of the Eastern Church's theology and ascetic practice.  But many Western theologians and spiritual writers talk about theosis as well.  One such is Augustine of Hippo.  Alvin Rapien, in a fairly comprehensive article appearing on The Patristic Project site, addresses Augustine's approach to theosis and quotes liberally from his writings.  Three such quotes are reproduced below.

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We carry mortality about with us, we endure infirmity, we look forward to divinity.  For God wishes not only to vivify, but also to deify us.  When would human infirmity ever dared to hope for this, unless divine truth had promised it.
Sermo 23 B

Still, it was not enough for God to promise us divinity in himself, unless he also took on our infirmity, as though to say, "Do you want to know how much I love you, how certain you ought to be that I am going to give you my divine reality?  I took to myself your mortal reality."  We mustn't find it incredible, brothers and sisters, that human beings become gods, that is, that those who were human can become gods.
Sermo 23 B

For the Word, which became flesh, was in the beginning, and was God with God.  But at the same time his participation in our inferior condition, in order to our participation in his higher state, held a kind of medium in his birth of the flesh...So also, just as his inferior circumstances, into which he descended to us, were not in every particular exactly the same with our inferior circumstances in which he found us here.  So our superior state, into which we ascend to him, will not be quite the same as his superior state, in which we find him.  For we by his grace are to be made the sons of God, whereas he was evermore by nature the Son of God.  We, when we are converted, shall cleave to God, though not as his equals.  He never turned from God, and remains ever equal to God; we are partakers of eternal life, he is eternal life.
On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants

Patriarch Ignatius IV, leader of the Antiochian Orthodox Church from 1979 until his repose in 2012, was born in Syria in 1920 as Habib Hazim.  He was educated in his native country and graduated from the Institute St Serge in Paris.  Below follows a brief but profound meditation on the Holy Spirit.  Hat-tip to the always stimulating Eclectic Orthodoxy site.

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Without the Holy Spirit
God is far away,
Christ stays in the past,
the Gospel is a dead letter,
the Church is simply an organization,
authority a matter of dominion,
mission a matter of propaganda,
the Liturgy no more than an evocation,
Christian living a slave morality.

But in the Holy Spirit
the cosmos is resurrected and
grows with the birth pangs of the Kingdom,
the Risen Christ is there,
the Gospel is the power of life,
the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
authority is a liberating service,
mission a Pentecost,
the Liturgy both memorial and anticipation,
human action is deified.

During his recent visit to Egypt, Pope Francis addressed an assembly of Roman Catholic priests and religious stationed in that country.  His talk was focused on seven temptations facing religious and how a knowledge of the Desert Fathers is relevant to their struggles.  The complete article appears in the website Aletheia (aletheia.org/2017/04/29/look-to-the-desert......./).

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1.  The temptation to let ourselves be led, rather than to lead.

2.  The temptation to complain constantly.

3.  The temptation to gossip and envy.

4.  The temptation to compare ourselves to others.

5.  The temptation to become like Pharaoh.

6.  The temptation to individualism.

The temptation to keep walking without direction or destination.

From a letter of Pope Leo I  Epist 28 ad Flavianum, PL 54, 763-767

Lowliness is assured by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity.  To pay the debt of our sinsul state, a nature that is incapable of suffering was joined to one that could suffer.  Thus, in keeping with the healing that we needed, one and the same mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ was able to die in one nature, and unable to die in the other.

He who is true God was therefore born in the complete and perfect nature of a true man, whole in his own nature, whole in ours.  By our nature we mean what the Creator had fashioned in us from the beginning, and took to himself in order to restore it.

He took the nature of a servant without stain of sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his divinity.  He emptied himself; though invisible he made himself visible, though Creator and Lord of all things he chose to be one of us mortal men.  Yet this was the condescension of compassion, not the loss of omnipotence.  So he who in the nature of God had created man, became in the nature of a servant, man himself.

He was born in a new condition, for, invisible in his own nature, he became visible in ours.  Beyond our grasp, he chose to come within our grasp.  Existing before time began, he began to exist in a moment in time.  Lord of the universe, he hid his infinite glory and took the nature of a servant.  Incapable of suffering as God, he did not refuse to be a man, capable of suffering.  Immortal, he chose to be subject to the laws of death.

Today's commemoration of Gregory of Nyssa brings a quote from his Great Catechism (ca 383).  It talks about the fact that Jesus is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist, but in typical Orthodox fashion, it does not greatly elaborate the manner in which this happens.  The translation used is found in The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol 2, WA Jurgens ed, The Liturgical Press 1979, p 49

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Since it has been shown that it is not possible for our body to become immortal except it be made participant in incorruption through communion with the Immortal, it is necessary to consider how it is possible for that One Body, though distributed always to so many myriads of the faithful throughout the world, to be whole in its apportionment to each individual, while yet it remains whole in itself...This Body, by the indwelling of God the Word, has been made over to divine dignity.  Rightly then, do we believe that the bread consecrated by the word of God has been made over into the Body of God the Word.  For that Body was, as to its potency, bread; but it has been consecrated by the lodging there of the Word, who pitched His tent in the flesh.  From the same cause, therefore, by which the bread that was made over into that Body is made to change into divine strength, a similar result now takes place.  As in the former case, in which the grace of the Word made holy that body the substance of which is from bread, and in a certain manner is itself bread, so in this case too, the bread, as the Apostle says, "is consecrated by God's word and by prayer"; not through its being eaten does it advance to become the Body of the Word, but it is made over immediately into the Body by means of the word, just as was stated by the Word, "This is My Body!"...In the plan of His grace He spreads Himself to every believer by means of that Flesh, the substance of which is from wine and bread, blending Himself with the bodies of believers, so that by this union with the Immortal, man, too, may become a participant in incorruption.  These things He bestows through the power of the blessing which transforms the nature of the visible things to that of the Immortal.

Fr Matthew Dallman is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Springfield (USA).  He heads up Akenside Press, an imprint devoted to Anglicanism's Catholic heritage.  Particular emphasis is placed on the writings of Martin Thornton (1915-1986), a priest of the Church of England  perhaps best known for English Spirituality.  Thornton's writings can be considered a ressourcement, a return to the Catholic wellsprings of Anglican theology and spirituality.  Dallman has condensed these sources into a very useful diagram reproduced above.  Below can be found some explanatory material on the chart taken from the Akenside website.

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Fr John Anthony McGuckin (b 1952) has joint professorial appointments at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University.  A native of England, he was raised Roman Catholic and was a member of the Passionist religious order.  He converted to Orthodoxy in 1989 and was ordained a priest in the Romanian Orthodox Church.  He is a specialist in Patristic theology and history with about 100 scholarly publications to his credit.  One of these, "Eastern Orthodox Prayer:  the Rasskaz strannika" is a detailed study of the editorial history and underlying theology and spirituality of The Way of a Pilgrim.  It is chapter 8 of Contemplative Literature: A Comparative Sourcebook on Meditation and Contemplative Prayer, Louis Komjathy ed, SUNY Press 2015.  The excerpt below is found on p 380.

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The tradition of the Pilgrim is rooted, of course, in the Eastern Orthodox Church.  That pathway of the Jesus Prayer is rooted in the larger scheme of what is known as the Hesychast movement.  This extends back to classical Christian antiquity, but came to a refined restatement from the thirteenth century onward and began a new wave of monastic revivals.  In the instance of the Pilgrim, this Hesychastic school was breaking out of the monastery and trying to make its way into ordinary, "secular" life.  Hesychasm derives from the Greek word for "quietness" (hesychia).  It sketches out a state of spiritual awareness where the body is first stilled by simple repetitive stances or actions (standing still, moving a prayer rope, and such), and the mind is given simple tasks of repetitive short phrases or words (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy--in the case of the Jesus Prayer) in order that the heart (by which the Hesychast school means the spiritual soul-awareness of a person [aisthesis noetikos], one's sense of God's presence to one and the world) may stand before God in a continuous awareness "beyond the range of words."  This stasis (the Greek word means a drawn-out condition, a stable state) is barely possible given the fragmented nature of human psychical awareness.  In prayer that is silent, imageless, and wordless, it takes only a matter of seconds before the normal freewheeling nature of the human imagination "fills the gaps" with psychic junk:  daydreams, distractions, thoughts of a hundred different things.  The Jesus Prayer that the Pilgrim uses, therefore, was meant as a mountaineer's rope--a way of ascending a difficult peak, a tool to rise out of normal states of ragged and dissipated consciousness into a sustained concentration on the awareness of God's immanent presence.  The physical posture of the prayer, the mental fixation on a few simple words, and the ultimate release of the heart's deeper awareness to be focused on God:  this is all the fabric of the structure of a system of prayer that is meant to be an aid to radical concentration, but concentration that is free, relaxed, nonideational.  And that is the point;  so that prayer might rise from being a matter of what we have to say to God into being enabled to hear what God might actually be saying to us.

Trappist oblate Carl McColman gives us a sermon by a monk of his monastery discussing a reference to deification found in the Prologue of the Rule of Benedict, a fairly rare occurrence in the writings of the Western Fathers.

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For today's 499th anniversary of the posting of Luther's 95 Theses, we have an interesting article from Christianity Today on contacts between the Lutheran reformers and Eastern Orthodox leaders during the 16th century.

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What Did The Reformers Think About The Eastern Orthodox Church?

Luther was generally positive toward the Eastern Orthodox church, especially because it rejected many of the things he most disliked about the Roman Catholic Church:  clerical celibacy, papal supremacy, purgatory, indulgences, and Communion by bread alone.  He frequently referred to the beliefs and practices of the "Greek Church", as he called it, as evidence that Catholics had deviated from principles upon which Christians formerly agreed.

Luther never attempted to build a bridge to the Eastern church, but some of his followers did.  Philipp Melancthon worked with Demetrios Mysos, a deacon sent by the patriarch of Constantinople to find out about the new religious movement in Germany, to complete a Greek translation/paraphrase of the Augsburg Confession, called the Augustana Graeca.  Mysos was supposed to take the document back to Constantinople, but he died on the journey.

Some Lutheran theologians at Tubingen tried to establish an even closer connection.  The "Eastern Orthodoxy" entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, edited by Hans J Hillerbrand, reports:

The Lutherans were convinced that they, rather than Rome, were the true apostolic and catholic church, and thus to establish contact with the venerable Greek church, to enlist its support against the papacy, and perhaps even to enter into communion with this apostolic church would have been a sensational victory.  Thus in 1575 they sent the Augustana Graeca to Patriarch Jeremias II (d 1595), asking his opinion.  There ensued over the next six years a friendly but candid exchange of extensive doctrinal correspondence (three letters from both sides totaling over four hundred printed pages).  Prominent topics discussed included the authority of scripture and tradition; the filioque; the nature of the church; grace, free will, and synergism; justification, faith, and good works; eucharistic practices; the priesthood and the ministry; prayers for the departed; the invocation of saints; feasts and fasting; and monasticism.  Except for those doctrines and customs of the Roman church that the East had never accepted, the changes in church teaching and polity advocated by the Lutherans were rejected by the Orthodox, who thus implicitly agreed on most issues with the Catholics.

Many Christians seem to think that the physical world we inhabit, indeed, our very bodies, are props that will be discarded when we die and "go to heaven".  The physicality of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, the cornerstone of traditional Christian belief, all too easily falls off the radar of even doctrinally orthodox believers.  The inability of many to connect emotionally with the earth and the physical cosmos is a contributing factor to the present crisis of environmental degradation.

A corrective to this viewpoint is found in the work of Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen.  In Incarnation: on the scope and depth of Christology (Fortress 2015), a collection of symposium papers which he edited, he presents the concept of  "deep Incarnation".  Taking into account the fact that the human body contains about 25 of the 118 elements in the periodic table; that these elements were created by billions of years of cosmological evolution; that all lifeforms today are descended from one unicellular organism that existed over 2 billion years ago; Gregersen asserts that when the Divine Logos became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, what was assumed was not merely the flesh of a first-century Galilean Jew, but the 13.7 billion years of cosmological and biological evolution encapsulated in that Jew.  The Incarnation is God uniting in love with the whole of God's creation.  Likewise, the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is a foreshadowing not only of the resurrection of all human beings, but of the restoration of the cosmos itself, so eloquently proclaimed by Paul in Romans 8: 19-22.

Some of the implications of deep incarnation and deep resurrection are discussed by theologian Elizabeth A Johnson in "Jesus and the Cosmos: Soundings in Deep Christology", found on pp 133-156 of the Gregersen book.
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For theology, the incarnation entails something that is not at all self-evident for monotheistic belief.  Here the transcendent Creator God who brings the world into being and sustains it at every moment chooses to join that world in the flesh so that it becomes a part of God's own divine history.  "The statement of God's Incarnation--of his becoming material--is the most basic statement of Christology", observes Karl Rahner...By becoming incarnate Holy Mystery acquires a genuine time, a life story, a death, and does so as a participant in the history of the cosmos...Becoming part of the material world allows the living God to be graciously present in a profound way that is not otherwise possible.

"Deep resurrection" pushes interpretation beyond its human scope to include a blessed future for the whole natural world...If this person Jesus of Nazareth--composed of star stuff and earth stuff, whose life was a genuine part of the historical and biological community of Earth, whose body existed in a network of relationships extending to the whole physical universe--if such "a piece of this world, real to the core" [Karl Rahner] at death surrendered his life in love to the living God and is now forever with God in glory, then this signals the coming redemption not just of other human beings, but of all flesh, the whole creation. The whole natural world, all of  matter in its endless permutations, will not be left behind or rejected but will likewise be transfigured by the resurrecting action of the Creator Spirit.

Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) was a distinguished bishop, prolific theologian, and compelling preacher--he was a great favorite of James I.  But he seems to be more accessible to 21st century people through his Preces Privatae, a notebook of prayers for his own use that was not published during his lifetime.   Gifted with a passionate intellectual and spiritual curiosity, his superb classical education enabled him to read both the Latin and Greek Fathers in the original.  He drew on  this material to supplement what some might consider to be the sparse resources of the official Book of Common Prayer.  "An Act of Adoration" is a good example of Andrewes as a man of prayer.

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O God the Father of heaven,
     who hast marvellously created the world out of nothing,
      who dost govern and uphold heaven and earth with thy power,
     who didst deliver thine only begotten for us unto death;

O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
     who didst will to be incarnate of a virgin,
     who hast washed us from our sins by thy precious blood,
     who rising from the dead didst ascend victorious to heaven:

O God the Holy Ghost, the Comforter,
     who didst descend upon Jesus in the form of a dove,
     who coming upon the apostles didst appear in fiery tongues,
     who dost visit and confirm with thy grace the hearts of the saints:

O Sacred, Higher, Eternal, Blissful, Blessed Trinity,
     always to be praised, yet always unspeakable:
          O Father good,
          O Son loving,
          O Spirit kind,
     whose majesty is unspeakable,
     whose power is incomparable,
     whose goodness is inestimable,
     whose work is life,
     whose love is grace,
     whose contemplation is glory:

Deity, Divinity, Unity, Trinity:
     Thee I worship, Thee I call upon,
     with the whole affection of my heart I bless now
          and for evermore.

The Episcopal Church today remembers Macrina (330-379), one of the few women to appear in the Patristic writers.  She came from an amazing family; three of her brothers were bishops--Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste--and she persuaded her widowed mother to turn the family estate into a monastery.  A family monastery, as things turned out. 

Macrina is surnamed "the Teacher" because of her prominence as a spiritual leader.  She wrote nothing that has survived, but her brother Gregory frequently quotes her in two of his own works, the Life of Macrina and On the Soul and the Resurrection.  The latter contains her thoughts on universal restoration, a frequent topic in Eastern Christian thought.  It is quoted below in a post found on the Tentmaker site. 

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He probably gives us her exact sentiments in his own language on universal restoration, in which she rises into a grand description of the purifying effects of all future punishment, and the separation thereby of the evil from the good in man, and the entire destruction of all evil. Her words tell us their mutual views. On the "all in all" of Paul she says:
"The Word seems to me to lay down the doctrine of the perfect obliteration of wickedness, for if God shall be in all things that are, obviously wickedness shall not be in them."
"For it is necessary that at some time evil should be removed utterly and entirely from the realm of being. For since by its very nature evil cannot exist apart from free choice, when all free choice becomes in the power of God, shall not evil advance to utter annihilation so that no receptacle for it at all shall be left?"
In this conversation in which the sister sustains by far the leading part, the resurrection (anastasis) and the restoration (apokatastasis) are regarded as synonymous, as when Macrina declares that "the resurrection is only the restoration of human nature to its pristine condition."
On Phil. 2:10, Macrina declares. "When the evil has been exterminated in the long cycles of the æons nothing shall be left outside the boundaries of good, but even from them shall be unanimously uttered the confession of the Lordship of Christ."
She said: "The process of healing shall be proportioned to the measure of evil in each of us, and when the evil is purged and blotted out, there shall come in each place to each immortality and life and honor."

David Steindl-Rast (b 1926) is a native of Austria.  After receiving a doctorate in psychology from the University of Vienna, he migrated to the United States and, after a few years, became a Benedictine monk of Mt Saviour Abbey in upstate New York.  Beginning in the 1960's, he gained  a reputation as a noted spiritual teacher and writer.  He is especially eminent in the area of Christian-(Zen) Buddhist dialog.  In a wide-ranging interview that originally appeared in the journal Parabola he addresses the supposed opposition between contemplation and social action.  The excerpt below is taken from The Inner Journey:  Views From the Christian Tradition, Lorraine Kisly, ed, Morning Light Press, 2006, p 74.

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You can't really be a contemplative, unless you want to change the world.  You want to change yourself, and that's where the struggle comes in.  By changing yourself, you're beginning to change the world.  In fact, you're changing the world much more by changing yourself than if you're running around blindly, involved in one cause after another.  But the difference between what we call the apostolic and the contemplative orders, or vocations, is that the apostolic approach says, "We live in this world, we're responsible for it, and we have to do something to change the world for the better."  The monastic answer is, "We are not strong enough to change the world in general.  Let's change that little spot where we are.  And let's put a wall around it and say this is as far as we go, as far as our strength reaches.  And now within that narrow confine, let's change the world, make it more what it's supposed to be."  That approach has its drawbacks, too, because it can become ingrown, its own private little affair.  And the apostolic approach has its limitations, because it can become so watered down that nothing spiritual remains.  So we need the two; they are the poles of one continuum.  People who are now engaged in apostolically changing the world need to come back periodically to a monastic environment where what they are trying to achieve everywhere is to a certain extent achieved already.  And if the world could gradually become what a good monastery or Zen center is, that would be fine.  The monastic communities can provide the strength, the encouragement to realize that true order can be achieved.

In The Twilight of Atheism:  the rise and fall of disbelief in the modern world (Doubleday 2004), Alister McGrath(who very much self-identifies as a Protestant Anglican) explores the ways in which the Protestant Reformation, or at least large parts of it, inadvertently paved the way for the emergence of atheism as an intellectually coherent worldview in the 18th century.  It did this by de-emphasizing the sacraments to such a large extent and replacing them with such a narrow focus on preaching and Scripture reading that God became reduced to an intellectual concept, divorced from the world's material sensuality.  The quote is found on p 212.

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Protestantism offered a God who was known through the preaching of the word of God; Catholicism, while not being inattentive to the importance of preaching, reinforced that message visually.  Slowly but surely, any sense of God as a living, engrossing reality began to slip from Protestantism.  The dull, joyless, and unattractive churches of Protestantism conveyed the subliminal message that the God who was to be found in them shared these disagreeable characteristics.  Protestantism has been chided by many cultural analysts for its failure to stimulate the arts.  The great Welsh poet RS Thomas castigated the movement for this failure, dubbing it "the adroit castrator of art" and "the bitter negation of song and dance and the heart's innocent joy".  Our concern is, however, rather more profound.  Protestantism encouraged the notion that God was absent from human culture and experience.

A substantial part of my activity as a scholar focuses on the history and thought of the Protestant Reformation.  As a result, I am a frequent visitor to some of the great centers of the movement, including Zurich.  I have often sat within the Great Minster of that city, looking around its vast interior, unadulterated by imagery or decoration, and noting the values it affirms--most notably, the absolute priority accorded to preaching, made clear by the size and location of the pulpit.  Its simplicity is admirable, and totally in conformity with the spirit of Zwingli's reform program of the 1520's.  But the building speaks subtly of a silent, absent, and distant God.  The Protestant reluctance to picture God has all too often led to an envisioning of the world that is bleak and barren, where it ought to be saturated with the radiance of the glory of God.  Once more, it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity.

For today's feast of the Visitation, Anglican theologian Eric L Mascall (1905-1993) provides some insight into the notion that Christ did not stop being human after the Ascension.  It is found in "Theotokos:  The Place of Mary in the Work of Salvation"  in The Blessed Virgin Mary.  Essays by Anglican Writers, ed EL Mascall and HS Box.  1963, Darton, Longman, and Todd.  Hat-tip to Zachary Guiliano and The Living Church (May 31, 2016).

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 If Christ had ceased to be man at his ascension — and it is to be feared that only too many Christians unreflectively assume that he did — then Mary would have ceased to be his mother, our incorporation into him would be a mere fiction, and so would our relation to him. But the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation declares that the eternal Son of God, who at one moment in the world’s history took human nature in the womb of Blessed Mary, is, in that human nature, man for evermore. […] Mary is the mother of Jesus and of those who are incorporated into him, the mother of the Church which is his Mystical Body and which, because a man and his bride are one flesh, is also Christ’s bride.
The Incarnation took place at the Annunciation, when in response to Mary’s Fiat, the Word was made very man in her womb. But the further fact of her relation to the Church and its members had to wait for the Ascension and for the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, when the Church, whose archetypal substance already existed in the manhood of Jesus, was fully and visibly constituted in power. In the Ascension the Lord’s human nature was withdrawn from human sight and touch. From then until Pentecost the apostolic group was the Church in expectancy and potentiality, awaiting its activation by the Spirit and the communication to it of the full reality of Christ’s manhood.
When the Spirit descended in tongues of fire, it was to make the waiting group into the mystical Body of Christ in a way analogous to that in which the descent of the Spirit upon Mary at her Annunciation had formed the natural body of Christ in her womb. Nevertheless, although the Mystical Body came into being by this new descent of the Spirit, there was not a new incarnation, Christ was not becoming man a second time, he was not assuming a new nature; the human nature which he had taken from his mother, in which he had died for our sins and risen again for our justification, was being made present under a new mode. There are not, strictly speaking, two bodies of Christ, a natural and a mystical, but one body of Christ which is manifested in two forms. 
Nor does the story end here, for that part of the Mystical Body which is on earth needs to be continually nourished and sustained, as Christ’s natural body did before its glorification. It is through the Eucharistic Body of the Blessed Sacrament that this takes place. Here again, there is not a new incarnation, but in the Eucharist the human nature which Christ took from his mother is made present in yet another form, a form through which that part of the Mystical Body which is still in via on earth is repeatedly sustained and renewed.
In all these modes of manifestation, the human nature of Christ is the human nature which he took from Mary. The descent of the Holy Spirit on Mary at the Annunciation first formed it, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles at Pentecost released it, so to speak, in the world as the Mystical Body of the Church, and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Eucharistic elements brings it to us as the Sacramental Body.
But in all these manifestations and expressions, it is one and the same Body, the Body which was formed in Mary’s womb, and so when we return from the Altar, having received the sacramental Body of Christ and having thereby been received more firmly into his Mystical Body, we can say with a new emphasis the words that, in the Genesis story, Adam said after he had tasted the food given him by the first Eve: ‘The woman gave me, and I did eat’ (Gen 3:12).
For it is the very body, the human nature, which Christ took from his mother, on which we are fed in the Holy Eucharist.
And Jesus and his members are one Body, the Whole Christ, and Mary is his mother and theirs.

Isaac was not only intoxicated with the love of God, he was intoxicated with the notion that God is love.  This even leads him at times to downplay God's justice, as contrasted to God's love.  Quotations illustrative of this are found on pp 40-43 of Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev's magisterial The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Cistercian Publications/Liturgical Press 2000)

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God chastises with love, not for the sake of revenge--far be it!--but in seeking to make whole his image.  And he does not harbor wrath until such time as correction is no longer possible, for he does not seek vengeance for himself.  This is the aim of love.  Love's chastisement is for correction, but does not aim at retribution...The man who chooses to consider God as avenger, presuming that in this manner he bears witness to His justice, the same accuses Him of being bereft of goodness.  Far be it that vengeance could ever be found in that Fountain of love and Ocean brimming with goodness!

Mercy is opposed to justice.  Justice is equality on the even scale, for it gives to each as it deserves...Mercy, on the other hand, is a sorrow and pity stirred up by goodness...; it does not requite a man who is deserving of evil, and to him who is deserving of good it gives a double portion.  If, therefore, it is evident that mercy belongs to the portion of righteousness, then justice belongs to the portion of wickedness.  As grass and fire cannot coexist in one place, so justice and mercy cannot abide in one soul.

As a grain of sand cannot counterbalance a great quantity of gold, so in comparison God's use of justice cannot counterbalance his mercy.  Like a handful of sand thrown into the great sea, so are the sins of the flesh in comparison with the mind of God.  And just as a strongly flowing spring is not obscured by a handful of dust, so the mercy of the Creator is not stemmed by the vices of his creatures.

And what is a merciful heart?  It is the heart burning for the sake of all creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and by the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears.  By the strong and vehement mercy which grips his heart and by his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or see any injury or slight sorrow in creation.  For this reason he offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those that harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy.  And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.