Father Vincent Pizzuto – Holy Transgression: Discipleship and the Incarnation – a hybrid event

This is a hybrid presentation being conducted both in person at The Center for Contemplative Living in Denver, CO and Online via Zoom videoconference. Breakfast snacks and a light lunch will be provided for in-person participants. This event will include two sessions of Centering Prayer in additional to Father Pizzuto’s talk.

Father Vincent Pizzuto will be joining us for a full-day event titled “Holy Transgression: Discipleship and the Incarnation.” In this presentation, Father Pizzuto will be speaking to us about Jesus’ coming as a manifestation of a whole new world view: the Kingdom of God.

The gospel narratives are replete with the theme of transgression. Routinely, Jesus drew his teachings and parables from the natural world, familiar to those around him, and used the most mundane images to shock his listeners into seeing the new world that was breaking upon them. In this new world—the kingdom of God, as he called it—the very idea of holiness and what it meant to be holy was radically challenged and transformed. No longer was holiness to be identified with something “set apart,” as the original Semitic root (qdš) implies. Rather, the in-breaking of the kingdom was just that, the realm of God breaking into the realm of humanity. This is why Jesus’ actions and teachings consistently emphasized the spirit of the law over the letter. He insisted that no religious observance was of greater importance than the practice of compassion and indiscriminate love for all.

Thus, not only does Jesus transgress social and religious boundaries in his teaching and actions, but so too as the “Incarnate One” does he transgress the very boundaries between heaven and earth. Throughout our Retreat, Fr. Vincent will examine this theme of “transgression” in the gospels as a lens through which to understand and embody an authentic contemplative Christian discipleship in the modern world. We will gradually unfold contemplative discipleship as a call, a vocation, that begins as an encounter with Christ that is as communal as it is personal. It begins with the end of my world and the in-breaking of the kingdom. It begins with a death to myself, and the rising of Christ within. And thus, we will come to see that contemplative discipleship is thoroughly cruciform, patterned on the paschal mystery of Christ’s dying and rising. It begins and ends in paradox. In order to live fully in Christ, I must lose my life for the sake of the Gospel.

About Father Vincent

Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D. is Professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Mysticism in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. in New Testament Exegesis from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium (2003). He has since published and presented internationally in the areas of New Testament Christology, ecological discipleship, marriage equality, inter-religious dialogue, Christian mysticism and contemplative Christian spirituality. In 2018 he published his second book, Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life, with Liturgical Press, to be released in Spanish, Contemplar a Cristo: Los Evangelios y la vida interior, in January 2022 by Desclée de Brouwer. As an Episcopal priest Fr. Vincent serves as Vicar of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and Retreat House in Inverness, California. Working for the advancement of contemplative Christianity, he has reinvigorated the mission and ministry of St. Columba’s through the introduction of contemplative eucharistic liturgies, public lectures, online courses, directed retreats, thought provoking sermons, an online blog and a weekly online study of his book through the Meditation Chapel.

Time listed are Mountain Time

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