A message to the yahoo forum by Fr Michael: 

Remember St. Athanasius' startling dictum:  "God became man so that man might become God."   Paul reminds us that we are a "new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17), even as the Second Letter of Peter claims that we are "sharers in the Divine Nature" (1:4).  We really must regain some of this boldness!   For the more fainthearted, theology reassures us that we are "adopted" children; that we are "God by participation", and not "God by nature."   Still, the experience is cataclysmic and overwhelming:   the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, according to St. Teresa of Jesus, or the log becoming fire, according to St. John of the Cross.

Yesterday I came across a brief interview on the BBC website given by the film director Werner Herzog about his new film 'Into the Abyss'. I was very struck by this: he talked with both relatives of the victims and the two men who are accused of the triple murder. One, Michael Perry, was executed last year and the conversation that Herzog had with him took place just a week or so before this execution. Herzog spoke about this man with the BBC interviewer and described him as 'the more dangerous' though he didnt explain what he meant by this. I googled and found a long article on a puzzling website called 'deathrow-usa' by Perry claiming his innocence and abuse by the police after his arrest. It's quite convincing. Having read more widely however one is left fairly certain that he was at least partly responsible for what happened. But how can one be 100% sure? How can one be sure enough to kill him, however overriding the evidence might seem?

I then looked at photographs of the institution where prisoners are kept on Death Row: a bleak and jumbled mass of windowless buildings filled with bars, locks and numbers which reminded me of pictures I have seen of concentration camps.

It still strikes me that any country that can claim that there are some people who are better dead is saying something significant not just about those guilty of heinous crimes but about ALL its people. It puts the justice system on a pedestal that it can never live up to. 

Mistakes are made. The wrong people are sentenced. but a justice system which maintains the death penalty is denying this. Either that, or it is saying, yes maybe we make mistakes sometimes but hey who cares? 

This taints the entire society: it somehow puts the entire community under a cloud. Nothing is left quite untouched by it. Certainly none of its citizens. If ever I visited the USA (and I can say now with some certainty that I never will) as I passed through customs I would be thinking to myself: "this country kills its criminals" and everything would seem a little darker.

more and more it is clear:

I cannot come to you alone.

my powerlessness is so manifest.

your hand is in mine . . .when I reach out.

when I turn away, call me!

my need for you echoes through me . . . 

and then is forgotten. . . .evaporating into an impenetrable void.

it isnt that it really goes away - I just lose the power of sight.

rather as though I forgot how to breathe:

though desperate for air I no longer  remember how to take it in.

(church in this post refers only to community in a broad sense.)

in the summer I visited an Anglican monastery;

in the country where I work the national church is pretty well the only one

but I struggle with both.

the real church-

the community which only you see and love -

how can this be directly linked to a national institution? 

It is also true that we can never be witnesses to this real church -

truths that we are not privy to -

this seemed important when I was in the monastery years ago

when I had to keep reminding myself that just because I was 'there'

in a visible church day after day -
did not mean that all was 'right'.

The church that we see can never be the church that you see.

So just because the church suddenly becomes 'international' as opposed to 'national' -

which arguably the Anglican church slightly is, and the Roman church more so -

does not mean that it is in any greater sense "the church that you see"

"Where two or three are gathered together".

But at least it helps break the initial mental "border barrier"

in a way that a nationalist church can clearly never do,

even from day one.

There is a sacramental element to any visible church, 

and the closer that visible church can get to representing the true church -

the church that you see and love -

then the more freely blessing can flow.

Guardian readers (although not very many it has to be recognised) voted for Bradley Manning to be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Encouraging!