T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” is as sincere a conversion poem as one can have it: No fancy light shining down from the heavens or a thunderous call to holiness; just one small event that left a Magus perplexed by a new worldview that was unsettling and strange, for it put into [...]
There is something essentially comic about vanity. I ran into the phenomenon recently at the local fitness center where I have a membership. Everyone, I suspect, has seen the type: he lifts weights, often with a lot of noise, and he scorns machines like the treadmill or the elliptical trainer, much less — are [...]
Of late I’ve grown rather cool toward Christmas. It’s a curious development. When I was a child, Christmas seemed the height of magic and mystery. Now when people ask me my favorite holidays, I answer Easter and Thanksgiving. I reason that the Resurrection and Gratitude are two of the best things there are, and [...]
Advent has only just begun but many of us are already thinking of Christmas. In one sense, this is fair enough. Advent is a time of preparation for our celebration of the birth of Christ and it is appropriate that we should be looking forward expectantly to the coming of Our Lord. In another sense, [...]
In the 1820s, Washington Irving was credited with inspiring the romantic revival of Christmas in America. His Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman relayed sentimental tales of the British holiday with all its romance and traditions. The five Christmas tales were later published in 1875 as a separate collection titled Old Christmas.* Having lived in London and its [...]
Nothing breaks through melancholy like a baby. During Advent, we wait for that moment of absolute newness that we need within but cannot muster, that moment when the whole of the divine nature, the whole meaning of universes beyond number, lies helpless before us… On Monday of this week, students met with me in the [...]
The challenge for the soldier at Christmas is to question his agency, and to reflect upon the birth of the Christ child as both the pronouncement of demise for those who intend to make war, and of salvation for those who suffer its symptoms… In the beginning, God. In the beginning, God created. In [...]
King Lear reminds us that only a love that cracks our hearts through loss can truly reveal the gift of the Incarnation… When John Henry Cardinal Newman writes about Advent in one of his sermons, he meditates on how this season of expectation falls at the end of the year. “All is past and gone, all [...]
The best way of seeing the joy of Advent and Christmas is through the eyes of a child, which ideally should be our own. We should see the time of expectation, which is Advent, through eyes which are pregnant with wonder. We should see the Babe who is born again on Christmas morn with [...]
Much has been written this year, indeed much is written every year, about the “war on Christmas.” A trip to the local Mall will show that the commercial stores are not only removing Christ from Christmas and forgetting the reason for the season but are also removing every hint of holiness from the holidays, [...]
On December 22, 1994, my new bride and I were enjoying our third day of wedded bliss at Myrtle Beach on our honeymoon when my pastor-parish relations chair called to inform me that a church member had died. The preceding months had allowed me the opportunity to minister to this gentleman during his terminal [...]
The Advent wind begins to stir With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir, It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea, And in between we only see Clouds hurrying across the sky And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry And branches bending to the gale Against great skies all silver pale The world seems travelling into [...]