Saturday, December 31, 2022
This is a cheerful world as I see it from my garden under the shadows of my vines. But if I were to ascend some high mountain and look out over the wide lands, you know very well what I should see: brigands on the highways, pirates on the sea, armies fighting, cities burning; in the amphitheaters men murdered to please applauding crowds; selfishness and cruelty and misery and despair under all roofs. It is a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and holy people who have learned a great secret. They have found a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasure of our sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They are masters of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians--and I am one of them.
-St. Cyprian of Carthage
Friday, December 30, 2022
Thursday, December 29, 2022
1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don't hit people.
4. Put thngs back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
6. Don't take things that aren't yours.
7. Say you're SORRY when you HURT somebody.
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Stryrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.”
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
For this [forgiveness] also, in place of the tree of knowledge, there was the Cross; in place of the stepping of the feet by which our first ancestors walked to the forbidden tree, and in place of their stretching out of their hands in order to take of the fruit of the tree, there were nailed to the Cross the innocent feet and hands of Christ; in place of the tasting of the fruit, there was the tasting of gall and vinegar, and in place of the death of Adam, the death of Christ.
St Symeon the New Theologian
Since our Lord Jesus Christ was without sin (for He committed no sin, He Who took away the sin of the world, nor was there any deceit found in His mouth) He was not subject to death, since death came into the world through sin. He dies, therefore, because He took on Himself death on our behalf, and He makes Himself an offering to the Father for our sakes. For we had sinned against Him, and it was meet that He should receive the ransom for us, and that we should thus he delivered from the condemnation.
St John of Damascus
The Logos of God, who is fully divine by nature, became fully human, being composed just like us of an intellectual soul and a passible body, save only without sin. … in His love for humanity, He willingly appropriated the pain which is the end of human nature… He did this in order that, by suffering unjustly, He might uproot the principle of our being conceived through unrighteous pleasure, which tyrannizes our human nature. Moreover, He did it so that, with the Lord’s own death being not a penalty exacted for that principle of pleasure, like other human beings, but rather a death specifically directed against that principle, He might erase the just finality which human nature encounters in death, since His own end did not have, as the cause of its existence, the illicit pleasure on account of which He came and which He subjected to His righteous punishment. For in truth it was necessary that the Lord - who is by nature wise and just and capable - not, in His wisdom, ignore the means of curing us, nor, in His justice, arbitrarily save humanity when it had fallen under sin by its own free will, nor, in His omnipotence, falter in bringing the healing of humanity to completion. … He exhibited the equity of His justice in the magnitude of His condescension, when He willingly submitted to the condemnation imposed on our passibility and turned that very passibility into an instrument for eradicating sin and the death which is its consequence (Ad Thalassium 61.89).
St Maximus the Confessor
For in the last days false prophets and seducers will increase…and then the deceiver of the world will appear as though he were the Son of God, and he shall do signs and wonders and the earth shall be delivered into his hands; and he will do immoralities which have never been done since the age began. Then shall the race of men will come into the fire of proving trial…
Didache 16:3,4,5
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
And the Word became flesh!…in order to make us earthly beings into heavenly ones, in order to make sinners into saints; in order to raise us up from corruption into incorruption, from earth to heaven; from enslavement to sin and the devil – into the glorious freedom of children of God; from death – into immortality, in order to make us sons of God and to seat us together with Him upon the Throne as His royal children. O, boundless compassion of God! O, inexpressible wisdom of God! O, great wonder, astounding not only the human mind, but the angelic [mind] as well!
St. John of Kronstadt, Sermon on the Nativity of Jesus Christ
Divine Scripture says, that Christ became High Priest and Apostle of our confession, and that he offered himself for us a sweet-smelling savour to God the Father. Whosoever shall say that... he offered himself in sacrifice for himself and not rather for us, whereas, being without sin, he had no need of offering or sacrifice: let him be anathema.
St Cyril of Alexandria
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Monday, December 26, 2022
“There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him...Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
-C.S. Lewis
Sunday, December 25, 2022
My mouth will utter praise of the Lord, of the Lord through whom all things have been made and who has been made amidst all things; who is the Revealer of His Father, Creator of His Mother; who is the Son of God from His Father without a mother, the Son of Man through His mother without a father.
He is as great as the Day of Angels, and as small as a day in the life of men;
He is the Word of God before all ages, and the Word made flesh at the destined time.
Maker of the sun, He is made beneath the sun.
Disposing all the ages from the bosom of the Father, He consecrates this very day in the womb of His mother.
In His Father He abides; from His mother He goes forth.
Creator of heaven and earth, under the heavens He was born upon earth.
Wise beyond all speech, as a speechless child, He is wise. Filling the whole world, He lies in a manger. Ruling the stars, He nurses at His mother’s breast. He is great in the form of God and small in the form of a servant, so much so that His greatness is not diminished by His smallness, nor His smallness concealed by His greatness.
For when He assumed a human body, He did not forsake divine works. He did not cease to be concerned mightily from one end of the universe to the other, and to order all things delightfully, when, having clothed Himself in the fragility of flesh, he was received into, not confined in, the Virgin’s womb. So that, while the food of wisdom was not taken away from the angels, we were to taste how sweet is the Lord.
-St. Augustine of Hippo
Saturday, December 24, 2022
IN THOSE DAYS a decree was issued by the Emperor Augustus for a registration throughout the Roman world. This was the first registration of its kind; it took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria. For this purpose everyone made his way to his own town; and so Joseph went up to Judaea from the town of Nazareth in Galilee, to register at the city of David, called Bethlehem, because he was of the house of David by descent; and with him went Mary who was betrothed to him. She was expecting a child, and while they were there the time came for her child to be born, and she gave birth to a son, her first-born. She wrapped him in his swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them to lodge in the house.
Now in this same district there were shepherds out in the fields, keeping watch through the night over their flock, when suddenly there stood before them an angel of the Lord, and the splendour of the Lord shone round them. They were terror-stricken, but the angel said, 'Do not be afraid; I have good news for you: there is great joy coming to the whole people. Today in the city of David a deliverer has been born to you, the Messiah, the Lord. And this is your sign: you will find a baby lying lying wrapped in his swaddling clothes, in a manger.' All at once there was with the angel a great company of the heavenly host, singing the praises of God:
'Glory to God in highest heaven,
And on earth his peace for men on whom his favour rests.
After the angels had left them and gone into heaven the shepherds said to one another, 'Come, we must go straight to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.' So they went with all speed and found their way to Mary and Joseph; and the baby was lying in the manger. When they saw him, they recounted what they had been told about this child; and all who heard were astonished at what the shepherds said. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over them. Meanwhile the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for what they had heard and seen; it had all happened as they had been told.
Luke 2:1-20 NEB
Friday, December 23, 2022
et admirabile sacramentum.
Ut animalia viderent
Dominum natum, iacentem in
praesepio: Beata Virgo,
cujus viscera meruerunt portare
Dominum Christum
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.
This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home
-G.K. Chesterton, The House Of Christmas
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
She kept it in a box to hide away.
But on the darkest winter nights—voilà—
She opened it resplendently to shine.
Or touched each dime-store bauble with delight.
Blessed by the frankincense of fragrant fir,
Nothing was too little to be loved.
We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hopes
Around the tree crowned with a fragile star.
No holiday is holy without ghosts.
-Dana Gioia, 'Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir'
The shipwrecked at the stable are captivated by joy and wonder. They have found the treasure in the field of Bethlehem. The pearl of great price is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Everything else is cheap, fake, painted fragments of glass.
The question for all of us is what we will really aim at next Christmas. If all we are going for is a placid decency, routine prayer, well-behaved worship and comfortable compassion, then we have effectively parted company with the shipwrecked and have no fellowship with the pearl-finder.
I wonder, if we were to stop people at random in the street on December 24 and ask them what they want most for Christmas, how many would say, “I want to see Jesus?”
I believe that the single most important consideration during the sacred season of Advent is intensity of desire. Paraphrasing the late Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “Jesus Christ is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance.” An intense inner desire is already the sign of his presence in our hearts. The rest is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps many of us are in the same position as the Greeks in chapter twelve of John’s Gospel who approached Philip and said, “We would like to see Jesus.”
The question addressed to each of us is: How badly?
The shipwrecked at the stable are an indispensable presence in the church. They rescue the Savior from the snare of convention and the clutches of organized religion. They are marginal men and women, not leaders or decision-makers. In their ministry of quiet presence they do not need to win or compete. They may look like losers even to themselves. If they courted the world, the world might respect them; if they rejected the world in sullen disdain, it might respect them even more. But because they take no notice at all of what the world thinks of them, they are mocked and made fun of.
The only explanation of why the little band of shipwrecked exists at all is the personal magnetism of Jesus. As Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “Only he who has experienced it can believe what the love of Jesus Christ is.” You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing love of God made present in the manger.
In 1980, the day before Christmas, Richard Ballenger’s mother in Anderson, South Carolina, was busy wrapping packages and asked her young son to shine her shoes. Soon, with the proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so pleased, she gave him a quarter.
On Christmas morning as she put on the shoes to go to church, she noticed a lump in one shoe. She took it off and found a quarter wrapped in paper. Written on the paper in a child’s scrawl were the words, “I done it for love.”
When the final curtain falls, each of us will be the sum of our choices throughout life, the sum of the appointments we kept and the appointments we didn’t keep. The glory of the shipwrecked will be that they habitually failed to turn up for duty. In their defense they claim they were detained by a baby in swaddling clothes. When interrogated as to why they hung out at a stable, they answer, “We done it for love.”
In their integrity the shipwrecked preserve the meaning of Christmas in its pristine purity- the birthday of the Savior and the eruption of the messianic era into history.
This Christmas, may you belong to their number.
-Brennan Manning
Her name was Czeslawa Kwoka, and her crime was being Polish, Catholic, and 14 years old. Her red triangle was for political prisoners, because of where she was born in Poland. After this photo was taken, she was killed in Auschwitz extermination camp on March 12, 1943 with a phenol injection in the heart.
Just before the execution, she was photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse, who would later testify against the executioner of Czeslawa, a woman. Just before the photo, the executioner punched her in the face, as the hematoma on her lip shows. This is the face of a terrified little girl, who didn't even speak the language of her executioner. She had lost her mother a few days before. But she dried her tears to look presentable for the photo. They took her hair and her life, but they couldn’t take her dignity.
She was only one of about 250,000 children and minors who were executed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This is what happens when hatred is cultivated in a nation and thugs gain control. Wake up, America. It could happen here.
Beyond what I have heard and seen, there are things which I can imagine: I can imagine a world in which there never would be pain, nor disease, nor death; I can imagine a world wherein every man would live in a castle, and in that commonwealth of castles there would be a due order of justice without complaint or anxiety; I can imagine a world in which the winter would never come, and in which the flowers would never fade, and the sun would never set; I can imagine a world in which there would always be a peace and quiet without idleness, a profound knowledge of things without research, a constant enjoyment without satiety; I can imagine a world which would eliminate all the evils and diseases and worries of life, and combine all of its best joys and happiness, and I wonder if all the happiness of heaven would be like the happiness of earth which I can imagine. . .
Will eternity be anything like what I have seen, or what I have heard, or what I can imagine? No, eternity will be nothing like anything I have seen, heard, or imagined. Listen to the voice of God: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for them that love Him.”
If the timeless so much surpasses time that there can be found no parallel for it, then I begin to understand the great mystery of the shape of the human heart. The human heart is not shaped like a valentine heart, perfect and regular in contour; it is slightly irregular in shape as if a small piece of it were missing out of its side. That missing part may very well symbolize a piece that a spear tore out of the universal heart of humanity on the Cross, but it probably symbolizes something more. It may very well mean that when God created each human heart, He kept a small sample of it in heaven, and sent the rest of it into the world of time where it would each day learn the lesson that it could never be really happy, never be really wholly in love, and never be really wholehearted until it went back again to the timeless to recover the sample which God had kept for it for all eternity.
Fulton J Sheen 'Go to Heaven: A Spiritual Road Map to Eternity'
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
-Christina Rossetti “Christmas Eve”
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Monday, December 19, 2022
“We notice in ourselves the struggle between faith and unbelief, between the good power and the evil one; and in the world, between the spirit of the Church and the spirit of the world. There, through the spirit, you will distinguish two clearly antagonistic sides : the side of light and the side of darkness; of good and evil; the spirit of the Church and of religion, and the spirit of worldliness and unbelief.”
-St John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
Sunday, December 18, 2022
God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance. We should also have missed the all-important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage, that would have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incarnate at all.
-C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis
Saturday, December 17, 2022
I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders. The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on. Christ has risen, and so we shall rise.
…To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’ in the same spirit in which he says ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’
Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.
The spring comes slowly down the way, but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on…to which He is calling us.
It remains with us whether to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.
-C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
Friday, December 16, 2022
He lies in a manger, but he holds the whole world in his hands: he sucks his mother’s breasts, but feeds the angels; he is swaddled in rags, but clothes us in immortality; he is suckled, but also worshiped; he could find no room in the inn, but makes a temple for himself in the hearts of believers. It was in order, you see, that weakness might become strong, that strength became weak.
-St Augustine of Hippo
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
-G.K. Chesterton from “The House of Christmas”
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
They say, “Discover your own truth.” You say, “I am the truth.”
They say, “Find your own way in the world.” You say, “I am the way.”
They say, “Follow your dreams.” You say, “Follow me.”
They say, “Live your own life.” You say, “I am the life.”
They say, “Find yourself.” You say, “Come unto me.”
It is astonishing how much depends on which voice I choose to listen to.
-Steven James, A Heart Exposed
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Monday, December 12, 2022
Sunday, December 11, 2022
It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss-
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.
It was time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight-
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.
And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
-Madeleine L’Engle 'Into the Darkest Hour'
Saturday, December 10, 2022
There is a better thing than the observance of Christmas day, and that is, keeping Christmas.
Are you willing...
to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you;
to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground;
to see that men and women are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy;
to own up to the fact that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life;
to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness. Are you willing to do these things even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas.
Are you willing...
to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children;
to remember the weakness and loneliness of people growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and ask yourself whether you love them enough;
to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear in their hearts; to try to understand what those who live in the same home with you really want, without waiting for them to tell you;
to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you;
to make a grave for your ugly thoughts, and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open--Are you willing to do these things, even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas.
Are you willing...
to believe that love is the strongest thing in the world—
stronger than hate, stronger than evil, stronger than death—
and that the blessed life which began in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago is the image and brightness of the Eternal Love?
Then you can keep Christmas.
And if you can keep it for a day, why not always.
But you can never keep it alone.
-Henry Van Dyke, 'Keeping Christmas'
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The only place where modern man does not like to visit - is himself. He cannot hear the silence, he does not want to hear the voice of his c...
