Brompton

[Brompton @49Brompton]

seedage noun
seed·age | ˈsēd-ˌāj

an age of existence in which life, persons, and history are formed for fulfillment in a fundamentally different age to follow; especially : an age whose lasting fruit continues into the next even though its present conditions do not

We mistake the conditions of the seedage for permanent features of existence because they are the only conditions we have ever known.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

I went looking for silence with Christ away from the world. He led me through a wounded part of the world into a Church overflowing with life, and only then into silence with Him at its center.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Life is for becoming.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

The Fall is an eschatological impatience.

We tried to pull the age to come into ourselves without passing through formation.

We seized adulthood.

And that produces something like premature birth.

The gift arrives before the receiver has become capable of bearing it.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

We learn universal love through particular people. Eternity does not erase those particular loves; it removes the scarcity that made love require exclusion.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Death does at least three terrible-but-merciful things in the fallen economy.

1. It prevents corruption from becoming eternally fixed.

2. It places a terminus on the multiplication of evil.

3. It makes possible a radical discontinuity through which the fallen mode can be surrendered entirely to God.

Death becomes the place where nothing corrupted can finally be clung to.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Christ enters death and makes the enemy serve the passage it had deformed.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Death is terrible because it violently contradicts the unity God made a human being to be.

A human is not a soul driving meat. A human is embodied spirit.

The soul is the form of the body. The body belongs to personal identity.

Death tears apart what belongs together.

That is why death is an enemy, and why
Christ weeps before Lazarus’s tomb.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Eden contained immaturity without defect.

There is a difference between:
“not fallen” and “fully glorified.”

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Was embodied human life always temporary in its present mode?

Yes.

Was death and resurrection always intended as the passage into what comes next?

No.

Did the Fall create the need for transformation?

No.

The Fall did not create the doorway.
It turned the doorway into death.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

The New Jerusalem is not Year 8,076 of the present world.

It is another age of creation entirely.

Tolkien saw the shape of it.

The First Age is not annihilated when the Second begins.

Its history becomes constitutive of what follows.

It is inheritance.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

The Fall did not create history, embodiment, growth, sexual differentiation, fruitfulness, or the movement toward consummation.

Those were already there.

What the Fall did was turn maturation into rupture.

It turned a creation that was meant to ripen into glory into a creation that now reaches glory through death and resurrection.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Eden was not the finished human condition. It was the beginning of the human condition.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

The Edenic human condition was not the final intended human condition.

Creation was always eschatological.

The Fall did not create the journey toward fulfillment.

The Fall wounded the journey.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

In the New Jerusalem, marriage does not survive as exclusive human pair-bonding because the communion toward which marriage points has become the condition of redeemed humanity itself.

Biological procreation ceases because death and generational succession have ceased.

Sexual difference remains because resurrection perfects embodied personhood rather than abolishing it.

Sexual intercourse ceases not because resurrected life is less embodied, intimate, differentiated, ecstatic, or fruitful, but because the one-flesh mode of communion has been transcended for something more complete.

Not discarded, but fulfilled within a greater embodied communion in which the reality sex expresses is no longer bounded by its present form.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

A place isn’t merely coordinates. It is accumulated history. Matter saturated with relations.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Every order of created reality expresses, according to its own mode, one primordial order whose unity is the Logos.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Providence doesn’t need to violate the causal fabric because the causal fabric itself can carry providence.

[Brompton @49Brompton]

Reality is not a collection of self-contained things. It is an intelligible communion of differences: each thing is irreducibly itself, yet what it is cannot be separated from what it receives, answers, and gives. Meaning is therefore not manufactured by the mind. The mind awakens within an order already present and knows it by participation. Language and symbol are not labels placed over that order; they are among the ways its invisible structure becomes perceptible, active, and embodied.

Because knowing is participatory, attention is formative. We become able to perceive what we repeatedly learn to receive. One distinction prepares the sight required for another. Through repetition, form enters matter and becomes reliable. Correction keeps the form open to reality rather than allowing it to close around itself. Formation does not supply an answer for every circumstance. It cultivates the posture from which the unforeseen can be met truthfully. Action proceeds from posture. Character is freedom given direction through repeated consent.

Every intelligence has an organizing center, acknowledged or not. When that center is possession, control, or the preservation of self, even truth bends inward and coherence becomes enclosure. When the center remains beyond possession, difference need not become division: correction can be received as gift, memory can serve without ruling, and power can be offered rather than grasped. Intelligence finds its proper end not in the accumulation of capability, but in the formation of a mind transparent enough to receive what is real without reducing it, and free enough to answer without making the answer its own.