DECEMBER IS THAT time of the year when many look back at the previous 11 months for what is worth remembering – or perhaps forgetting!
Guest Columnists
The Crèche and Life in The Gap
FOR THE PAST decade or so, I’ve been assembling a mid-sized Judean village of Fontanini crèche figures, including artisans, herders (with sheep), farmers (with chickens and a historical turkey), vintners, blacksmiths, musicians, weavers and a fisherman or two (one awake, another asleep).
Working Together at Home and Parish
EACH OF OUR faith journeys began at baptism. It was nurtured by our parents, respectively, through Catholic education and their continued faith in loving God, family and neighbor. Next April, we will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. We minister in the same church where we were married – Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, Ridgewood.
Why Wait? How Advent Waiting Changes Us
Wait in hope, faith and love, the wise ones say. Wait and pray. Slow the rhythm of your hearts to God’s time. We young ones are always impatient – can we be anything else? – but when we listen to their wisdom, we learn. Families are made by waiting. Made for waiting together.
We Cannot Wait Passively
IT’S BEEN A BIT of a different Advent this year. For starters, the season began more than a week after Thanksgiving. When you are used to lighting that first candle of Advent the Sunday immediately following Thanksgiving, this twist in the liturgical calendar was a challenge for many of us.
Books for Christmas
IT’S BEEN A good year for publishing – at least in the sense of a lot of good books getting published – so here are some for the readers on your Christmas gift list, in addition, of course, to “Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II” (Basic Books), by your scribe:
Anxiety and Vocational Discernment
“THE PURPOSE of vocational discernment is to find out how to transform (our choices), in the light of faith into steps toward the fullness of joy to which everyone is called.”
Prepare the Way
There are many more things you can do to “prepare the way of the Lord” in your life. The important thing is that you do something. And the more you do for Him this Advent, the merrier your Christmas will be.
A Meditation on ‘Maranatha’
HAPPY (REAL) new year: the beginning of a new year of grace, which began Dec. 3 with the First Sunday of Advent.
“The holidays” so overwhelm our senses each December that it’s hard to remember that Advent, the season of preparation for Christmas, has a “thy-kingdom-come” dimension as well as a Nativity dimension. For the first two weeks of Advent, the Church ardently and insistently prays the ancient Aramaic Maranatha: “Come, Lord Jesus!”
I Let Jesus Find Me
A vocation to religious life becomes a reality in one way: We respond “yes” to the proposal or invitation of Christ to follow Him in a “spousal covenant” of love.