Join our Clergy in the Philbrick Room on Sundays at 11:30a and in Thaxter Hall at 5pm for our Lenten Series Vocabulary of our Faith. Using the book 'Wishful Thinking - A Seeker's ABC's' by Frederick Buechner as a guide, we will explore our faith in conversation as we reflect on a different word each week. The conversations will last about an hour. The evening conversation will conclude with a soup and bread dinner and Compline at 7p.

ETERNAL LIFE

the word of the week

'We think of eternal life, if we think of it at all, as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.

Saint Paul uses the phrase 'eternal life' to describe the end and goal of the process of salvation. Elsewhere he writes the same thing in a remarkable sentence in which he says that the whole purpose of God's slogging around through the muck of history and of our own individual histories is somehow to prod us, jolly us, worry us, cajole us, and, if need be, bludgeon us into reaching "maturity . . . the measure of the full stature of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13).

In other words, to live eternal life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.'