A WOMAN I KNOW, whose family owns a retail business in a small town, once commented, “Christmas is not a pleasant time at our house.” I found this a sad commentary on what Christmas has become for so many of us: a time of increased anxiety and stress and discord. We lash out at loved ones because we’re spending money we can’t afford to spend, or, as with this woman, because Christmas is what makes
The story of Christ’s birth speaks to us about the mysterious ways of God. The Triune God acts in ways that we do not always expect! His ways are truly wonder-filled. For centuries, the Ancient Israelites had expected the Messiah. The prophets, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, called the people to readiness and openness to God’s actions. Their message provided the people with indications about the coming Messiah. Yet, when ‘the fullness of time had come’
EVEN NOW THE VOICE CALLS OUT TO US, asking that we turn, bidding us again to prepare the way of the Lord. And most of us, most of the time, will break our hearts trying to respond as we should. Repentance—that turn of heart and mind—is not so easy to accomplish, nor do our preparations of “the way” ever feel quite complete. Still and always, the voice calls to us from the wilderness and calls
I LOVE THESE LINES IN ISAIAH; the sweetness of their assurance is absolute: I am the LORD your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go. And my heart is broken by the verses that follow. O that you had hearkened to my commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea; Your offspring would have been
A VOICE SAYS, “CRY!” And so I prepare to lift my voice to cry. But, like the holy prophet, even as I take in breath to make my cry, I wonder, “What shall I cry?” I’m guessing that this must be the unceasing prayer of the prophet; it is certainly the unceasing prayer of the poet. I would suppose that very few poets turn out to be prophets, but what I gather, even so, is
INTO THE DESERT OF HUMAN HISTORY, and even here, in to the modern deserts we shape and inhabit, at a time when the poor and needy—their tongues parched with thirst—desperately seek life-sustaining waters, the Holy One pours out rivers and fountains. He places the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive along their banks, and he sets together the cypress, the plane, and the pine. He is with us in our poverty, and he
WE PREPARE TO WITNESS A MYSTERY. More to the point, we prepare to witness The Mystery, the God made flesh. While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task, to suppose that we ever know anything about him except what he has made known to us. The prophet Isaiah helps us to remember our limitations when he writes,
THE SLOWEST OF PILGRIMS, I have come to see how my own faith, fragile as it is, is assisted and sustained by the calendar, by the lectionary—by the seasons of the Church. I want to share my growing understanding that our participation in this cycle is one way we might, as they say, redeem the time. “The days are evil,” writes Saint Paul, imploring us to do something about it. By deliberately attaching our given
The island of Cyprus was both the birthplace and the place where this glorious saint served the Church. Spyridon was born of simple parents, farmers, and he remained simple and humble until his death. He married in his youth and had children, but when his wife died he devoted himself completely to the service of God. Because of his exceptional piety, he was chosen as bishop of the city of Tremithus (Trymithous). Yet even as
Christmas is about Emmanuel, God with us. The accent is on the immanence of God. We cannot understand the miracle of the immanence unless we understand the glory of the transcendence, and the other way around. “In the poorest of the poor we see Jesus in distressed disguise.” So said Mother Teresa as she and her nuns ministered to the abandoned babies and dying aged whom they gathered in from the streets of Calcutta. Disguise
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