If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still.”And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.

Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.

The crucial distinction can be discerned by differentiating between deification, an ontological sharing in the Godhead in which the human literally becomes divine, and theosis, a participation in the life of God the Father through...