My favorite lines about Christ's "Second Coming" are in the story "A Christmas Memory," by Truman Capote. In this autobiographical piece of great delicacy, the author describes his last Christmas with the woman who brought him up. The author is seven at the time; she...
Good religion, however, is always about seeing rightly: "The lamp of the body is the eye; if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light," as Jesus says in Matthew 6:22. How you see is what you see. And to see rightly is to be able to be fully...
We can either stay within the Christianity we have mastered with the Jesus we have domesticated, or we can leave Christianity as a destination, embrace Christianity...as a way of life, and then journey to reality, where God is present and living in every person, every...
I believe that, beyond all our desires to be appreciated, rewarded, and acknowledged, there lies a simple and pure desire to give. ...Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a...
Imagine an ironworker trying to bend and shape a piece of cold iron. No matter how hard the iron is battered, little or nothing will happen. We do the same when we try to deal with the past by reliving regrets about it over and over. We cannot change it. It still...
Each of us is called to prophetic agony—to speak the Word, to do justice and righteousness. We are most truly ourselves when we live within God’s insecurity, acknowledging Yahweh’s sovereignty over creation, taking full responsibility as contingent creatures who yet...
We must beware of the naive idea that our music can “please” God as it would please a cultivated human hearer. That is like thinking, under the old law, that He really needed the blood of bulls and goats… For all our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like...
For the Christian, Jesus Christ is always our contemporary and the present is always a day of judgment and of opportunity. Our task is not to go back to him but to catch up with him. It is not “back to the Bible.” It is forward until we can grasp the wisdom and...
This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love. When I die love continues to be active, and from full communion with God, I am present by love to those I leave behind. from Finding My Way Home
If happiness is what we feel when we think we’ve got what we want, then joy is what we feel when we discover we already have what we most need. Joy is still present when life is hard. Christ comes for grieving people with broken homes and broken hearts. Christmas is...