The devil is in the details---Br. Stephen Treat, O. Cist.

I have a new friend via The Anglo-Catholic website, a Cistercian monk and former Anglican, who has a wonderful post this morning that is exactly what I needed to read this morning:

Who will be a priest? Who will be the ordinary? How will property issues be settled? What book will we pray from? What is the CDF saying to the episcopal delegates? Who had a secret meeting about what with whom last Tuesday? The questions multiply and their intensity grows as we enter what seems to be the final leg of the journey before the erection of the first Ordinariates.

It is perhaps a good time to reflect on the old phrase, “The Devil is in the details,” because he is in the details and all of the opportunity for doubt and dissension that they create. Focusing on and arguing about various scenarios becomes a place for discord and the diabolic to take root and flower.

There are many details that are as yet unclear, but most of us can do little to effect those. It is a time for prudence and prayer and to remember that, ultimately, the faith to make this journey does not rest in current leaders, beloved though they might be; in national episcopal conferences; or even in the Holy See. The Anglican Ordinariates are not finally a structural arrangement between institutions but an avenue to draw closer to the God whom we believe to be “a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”

-snip-(But please go and read it all!)

If Anglicanorum Coetibus is the will of God, men may delay and stymie it a bit, but they cannot frustrate it. In turn, we must keep our eyes on the prize, which is not Holy Orders, the Authorized Version, or a particular Ordinary. The prize is the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, which Paul speaks of in Philippians 3, which may be another good passage to reflect upon when we are tempted to despair:

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing. Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample. (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.) For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.

Please read the whole thing!