I know it was Bruce's wish to publish his Reparations. Thanks to the internet, it is now possible to publish it via this blog. I hope you will enjoy what Bruce has written, and I hope it will inspire you in your walk with God.
PROLOGUE
As a Catholic boy in the 1950's, I was taught the things of God primarily through church liturgy and the sacraments. These teaching tools of the church are meant to demonstrate relationships through ritual. A child does not learn theological matters through study. So the church in her wisdom speaks in ways a child and the uneducated can understand. If it were not so, the Gospel would be only for the wise. And we find quite the opposite to be true: it is those who think themselves wise who miss it. The Eucharist, for example, shows the simple and wise that Jesus Christ can be present to me, knowable in the tangible form of bread and wine. At the age of seven I gained this profound and inexplicable understanding at my First Communion. I could touch the God who created me. The God who created me could touch me.
The sacraments and liturgy have been validated down the annals of church history as outward signs of an inner work that anyone can understand. They enable the novice to experience the truths of God at a life-changing and mystical level. We need them even as our understanding matures. Indeed this is why God has come in the flesh. In the end it is not theology, nor the understanding of it, that saves us. It is the hand of a personal God.
As an adult Jesus touched me afresh. At that time, Scriptures came alive to me - my touch point with God. Reading them I experienced God's reality as tangibly as a sacrament. The desire to know Him more became a hunger. I found Scriptures to be the source of understanding the character and workings of a loving and saving God. Of understanding what was behind the experience of God's grace. The Scriptures satisfied my adult need for sense and reason. Still it is God Himself I long for.
QUOTE
Jesus Christ calls us, who call ourselves by His Name, to something that few are willing to follow. He does not call us to a life of self-fulfillment, not to self-realization, not to self-gratification, not to a full life here and now, not to empowerment, or notoriety, not to ascendancy...but to death. Not to a physical death but to something much harder - death to self. Death to my own ambitions, death to my own desires, death to my own way of seeing and doing things. He calls me to the unthinkable...to lay down my life for another. The cost is mortification, humiliation, not getting my own way, being ridiculed by some, called self-righteous by others, abandoned by the world view until His way is my sole desire. "If you want to save your life, you must lose it", are the words that we read, but do not want to hear or follow. Some who do, however, come to experience the truth of it and are set free indeed as Jesus Himself promises.
INTRODUCTION
Our life on earth is in repair from birth to death. And the repair consists in this: we are continually repairing to God through Jesus Christ, drawn by His Spirit. The drawing of God brings us back to Him from our self-ventures time and time again until we begin to recognize that we are becoming fixed - fixed on Him as it were. Continual reparation to God.
This is the purpose of life.
Reparations is after the manner of that mysterious marriage of faith and reason that leads us to God. The mystery is this: it takes faith to know God, who is unknowable; it takes reason to explain faith, which is inexplicable.
Reparations is contemplative in intention. It is meant to stir you to consider and reconsider deeply the reasonable truth of Jesus Christ, God come in the flesh to die on your behalf, and on behalf of the whole world. Finally to lead you by faith to experience His saving touch, and grow in the grace and knowledge of Him that loves you. May you be drawn to know Him with all your being.
