"Among those things that hold us back is our isolation from each other; by our obsession with our individual selves, we shut out what others may give us, even when they are offering life and newness. And one of the most dramatic ways we do this is by projecting blame on each other; it's often been said that the first visible effect of the fall of Adam in the story of Genesis is his eagerness to blame Eve. But it is wider than that: somehow we cut ourselves off from all sorts of sources of life. In relations between men and women, our greediness and impatience can ruin the gifts God wants to give through faithfulness and mutual service. In the relations between humanity and its natural environment, a similar greed and haste prevents us from responding to that environment with praise and wonder. We set up oppositions between soul and body, as if we could think about the health and goodness of one without the other. In short, we are compulsive dividers, separators, and in these divisions we deny ourselves the life God is eager to give.

"Some of the theologians of the Eastern Church, not long before the controversies over icons broke out, had begun to think about what it meant to see Christ as the one who bridged all these divisions. Maximus the Confessor, probably the greatest Christian thinker of the seventh century, speaks of how every one of the great separations human beings have gotten used to is overcome in the person and the action and the suffering of Jesus. The divide between man and woman, between paradise before the fall and the earth as we know it, between heaven and earth, between the mind's knowledge and the body's experience, between creature and creator — all are overcome in the renewed humanity that Christ creates.”