A Taste of Liberty

FAIRACRES PUBLICATIONS 83
In Christ the Kingdom of heaven has already come, yet in the Lord’s Prayer we continue to pray for its coming. We dare not identify the Church with the Kingdom, but in the Church we may experience here and now a foretaste of the life of the Kingdom and of the glorious liberty of the children of God. Through the mysteries of the Cross and Resurrection, Christians enter into an amazing liberty; they receive the manifold gifts of the Spirit, to live in communion with each other and with the whole angelic world, to grow beyond their natural limitations in time and space, from glory to glory. These are the riches held in common by all Christians and recognized as such wherever prayer is at the heart of their lives. The original setting for this retreat given by A. M. Allchin for the Athens branch of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius was the Greek Monastery of Hosios Loukas. Within the Anglican tradition Canon Allchin quotes extensively from the sermons and writings of the Caroline divines, Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker; he allows Orthodoxy to speak especially through its tradition of worship and liturgy; and he finds these statements equalled and echoed by Charles Wesley and the Protestant hymn-writers of Wales.