Minute Meditations
How Can We Grasp This Truth?
I have long felt that Christmas is a feast that largely celebrates humanity’s unconscious desire and goal. Its meaning is too much for the rational mind to process, so God graciously puts this Big Truth on a small stage so that we can wrap our minds and hearts around it over time. No philosopher would dare to predict the materialization of God, so we are just presented with a very human image of a poor woman and her husband with a newborn child. (I am told that the Madonna is by far the most painted image in Western civilization.)
The Incarnation Invites Us to Compassion
We need to show compassion for those in need during this season and year-round. We miss the point of the Incarnation if we feel that feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless are activities for this season only. Educational theorist ...
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The Incarnation Changes Everything
The custom of setting up a Christmas crib in one’s home—not simply outside a church—reinforces the personal challenge represented by the Incarnation. The Incarnation changes everything in human history. We become different people because of it. In Francis’s day, many ...
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Invitation to Prayer
One day when Francis was in a lonely place by himself, weeping for his misspent years in the bitterness of his heart, the joy of the Holy Spirit was infused into him and he was assured that all his sins ...
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A Celebration of the Jesus Vision
People usually think of Christmas as a traditional and sentimental festival, but not as a celebration of the Jesus vision it commemorates: a philosophy of profound reform. The child lying in the manger would become perhaps the most radical of ...
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Prepare the Way
Then as he was walking through the forest joyfully singing in French and praising God, he was suddenly set upon by robbers. They threatened him and asked him who he was but he replied intrepidly with the prophetic words, “I ...
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What Waits in the Dark?
Ancient storytellers observed that the sun makes a journey every night. To their eyes, the sun slipped out of sight in the western sky and descended into the dark earth or ocean, only to reappear far to the east at ...
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