Friends, welcome to Word on Fire, Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated

to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every

continent and to facilitate and encounter with Christ and His Church. The efforts of

Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where

it is most needed. Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Baron as he preaches

the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, I'm not sure this story with you before, but I think we

privileged many years ago now of meeting Father Godfrey Deakman. Godfrey was a monk of St.

John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. And when I met him, he was about 92. We met

through a mutual friend. Godfrey had been a leader in the liturgical movement in the

1920s. He had been a player at Vatican II. At least instrumental in writing some of

the documents. He was just a great man of the church. Anyway, after conversing with him

for several hours, he was 92, but he was very lively. He was in a wheelchair, I remember,

but a lot of energy. I finally worked up the courage to ask him, I said, Godfrey, if

you were young again and you could mount the barricades, what would you fight for in the

church? And without hesitation, he had a cane in his hand. He was sort of waving it around

and he brought it down on my knee and he said, deification. No, it wasn't the answer I

was really expecting, but Godfrey was a scholar of the church fathers, especially the Eastern

fathers. These great figures took it as axiomatic that the Christian life is about something far

more than mere moral rectitude. Do you know what I'm saying? More than just being an upright

person, being an ethically correct person. Rather, it was about what they called in the East

anyway, theosis. Theosis means deification. It means becoming God. When this gets translated

...