Rowan Williams, with a characteristically beautiful meditation on how God repairs us and the world in the new issue of Plough:

The incarnation of the Word of God opens up the central reality of what we are in God’s hands. It repairs that great disease of the imagination that prompts us to fantasize about being free from the body and the passage of time, free from the constraints of what we have made of ourselves, from our promises and mutual obligation, from our sheer neediness. It is this disease of the imagination that makes us fear and despise strangers – and all the strangenesses of the world we are part of, and, not least, the stranger living within our own heart. […]

In what must be one of the oddest ideas in religious history, we come to grasp – just a bit – the extraordinary fact that for us to be in the image of God, growing up into the fullness of love and freedom and joy for which we were created, means “growing into the cradle”; being born again, as they say, not as a moment of religious consolidation but in a new beginning of grateful dependence and the acknowledgment of a hunger for the real that will be both satisfied and stimulated afresh by the constant gift of God wherever we turn. Our sin-obscured selves are repaired as we are built again into our created place and, out of that, are given the freedom to be, in our own ways and at our own level, “creators,” beings through whom the one Creator transmits life and promise. The exchange of spiritual gifts that Saint Paul so wonderfully describes in the life of the Christian community is just the tip of the iceberg, a fragment of the reality in which the entire creation lives.