Friends we are all, till God’s grace comes. The waker of sleeping souls, tamer of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, proclaimer of a general philanthropy–Death does what nothing else can do; it teaches, by strengthening us in the force of the divinest example, to forgive injuries and to shut out the from the soul the remembrance of past evils. It is not so hard to die. The preparation is the difficulty. Why this gloom at the thought of the dead? And why should we not be glad? Is it that we ever think of them as departed from all joy? Is it that we believe that indeed they are dead? Death, to one in health, is a very terrible thing. We pity the person for what one suffers; and we pity ourselves for what we must some time hence in like sort suffer; and so are doubly affected. Many words of deep significance, many entire sentences, and those possibly the most important one, have flown too far on the winged breeze to recover. To be honest…Bishop, you know what hurts more than anything else…it was the death, rebirth, and subsequent heartbreak for profit and popularity. I could have bore it with a thankful art. However, the words she spoke, lambs could not forgive, nor worms forget.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 7

One heart beats with other hearts in the presence of human pain. Revelation necessarily involve the use of concepts that would cancel each other out. Thinking that someone could be so horrible and blame something horrible on someone you love so much. Although many of you are viewed as professionals and pillars of society, you all are not better than street thugs. Like a homicidal energizer bunny, you have tried to rush me to the grave. You may hide in the mountains, but the law will find you. The government and law are not of purely human origin. Only in a qualified sense, governments derive their powers from the assent of the governed. All power, however, ultimately comes from God; he alone has absolute sovereignty. We are called from beyond our own little lives to enter into the lives of others. To respond—so simple, so meaningful, so significant, so natural, so inevitable. However, what sounds so right and what seems so real, upon closer examination, turns into that which is unclear and uncertain. We are split—divided within and separated without. From the moment of birth, we enter into a condition characterized by distance and division.  #RyanPhillippe 2 of 7

People seek help in their struggles with such problems as identity and alienation and look to psychotherapy to resolve their spiritual unrest or feelings that they are not getting all they should out of life. Their pain reflects the confusions of moral standards and disintegration of values in today’s World, as well as the increasing proportion of the educated and affluent who have the leisure and inclination to brood about such issues. The idea of a World of pain can be understood more accurately as human pain. Of course, there is physical pain, bodily injury, and biochemical disturbance can produce excruciating suffering. The psychological pain, with its locus in an individual’s sense of self and worth; the sociological pain with its locus in our sense of affiliation and alienation; spiritual pain, with its locus in our sense of power and meaning makes people feel like they are upside down in this life. These people have caused trouble all over the World and you welcome them into your house. The key way in which sin manifests itself in human life is in the failure of humans, both in theory and in practice, to understand themselves as persons.  #RyanPhillippe 3 of 7

We are never nearer to evil than when we believe a person is incapable of wrongdoing. The ghost of what you all have done to me and my family haunts my thoughts and daily life, and it shows me that many of you continually reject your status as persons. God is the original person and humans are derivative persons, and before the Fall of men, persons were persons of God. Many people have entered a rebellion against God, and seeks continually to be their own masters. However, death, and resurrection is a love that alone can break this rebellious self-will and that alone can provide humanity with a model of goodness. Such secular ethics can at best exhibit the kind of goodness that can defeat depersonalization as a hypothetical possibility. The revelation of Christ alone makes it actual. Revelation, however, does not provide us with a code that we can then detach from its origin and live by. We must return continually to revelation for renewal. This is in part because of the character of human sin, but also in part because we must reassert the personal character of social life in new contexts. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 7

We too easily and too casually move into responding to others’ lives. We can too inadvertently and too unknowingly confuse our lives with their lives. We can too glibly and too blindly misunderstand that nature of genuine respond to human pain. When God reveals himself to you, he does so as a person. Once I contact what I have overlooked or denied or rejected, I again become creator-sustainer.  Revelation is the act of a person, not the setting out of a doctrine. God is an inferred entity; and is an object. In revelation, God encounters an individual person to person; humans cannot argue their way to Go by a philosophy or discover God apart from the Biblical revelation, yet when God calls, humans at least can answer. It seems that many people have been totally corrupted by the Fall and cannot advance an inch toward God by means of their natural powers. Grace has to supply even the capacity of responding to God’s initiative. Many people are mere puppets, and have laid great stress on the natural human’s capacity for speech and for elementary rationality as a precondition of any response to God. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 7

A family is a creation that is allowed by God. An order of creation is a social institution or practice of ordinary human origin, not derived from revelation, but shown by Biblical evidence to have divine authorization. Dependency, aging, and dying have their own specific constellations of pain. Yet within these three experiences, the throb of human pain is present, touching with each of us where we are, as we are. We come into the World; we pass through the World; we depart from the World. Our coming and our going call forth response to us from others equally with response to others from us. The Earth did go round and the Heavens dis stand still. Through the centuries, the care of souls has tended to be individualistic. The cent has seen pain on the level of individuals, separated, isolated, insulated from the settings and systems in which people live and move and have their being. We have to discover I mystery means for surviving with significance. When we do not have ourselves together—when we are in many pieces—then we find ourselves constantly putting those pieces out into the World.  #RyanPhillippe 6 of 7

Out there, when we expose our fragmented selves to the World, we no longer experience them as parts of us. People should not be walking around broken, or having emotional explosion. Everyone is not supposed to be going through a personal struggle. We cease to be aware that these fragments are, in truth, expressions and extensions of ourselves. Thus, they act as constant sources of difficulty and pain, as they tear us apart, so we tear at others. Your life and my life no longer limit each other. God has become all in all—the One in the many and the many in One. Therefore, in order for us to live with the pieces in other people’s lives, it is necessary for us to begin to find our peace in the various pieces of our own lives. Only as we are somehow together—centered, integrated, whole—can we stay with the shrapnel of others. We must experience the difference between tension and relaxation as we consciously and gradually let the tension go. Our bodies, the very dwelling place of the Most High, provides the foundation for getting ourselves together. Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but good, never. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 7