For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
-T. S. Eliot
Resurrection
These are the last days of the year
I feel like I want to slow them down
Drain them dry
Not sure why
First time i’ve had this feeling
Between Christmas
and a New Year
Usually I can’t wait
for the page to turn
Im always ready for
the bright shiny new year
To come and bring new things
Shimmering with possibility
Glimmering with potential
Empty slate-start over time
This year I feel these last few days of 2012
Are important for me
To grasp
In ways Ive never felt before
In three days a lot can happen
A death and burial
Even, on occasion,
a resurrection
AL 12/27/12
At Christmas time we think of the “Christ child,” though we know nothing of Jesus’ childhood. But there is this: Luke says when Jesus was twelve, when his family went to the temple in Jerusalem they accidentally left him behind. After three days they found him, in the temple.
Insert your own funny family story here of the kid being left somewhere (ours is a gas station). But wait― three days? Clearly, this is not a biographical story, but a symbolic one. It’s a story about losing and finding, being with and without, separation and reunion. In the Bible three days is not chronological time, it’s symbolic time: Abraham and Isaac on the mountain… Jonah in the whale… Jesus in the tomb. Three days means loss and transformation, death and resurrection. And it comes at Christmas time.
Because Christ comes to us to be with us in our death. Christ comes to us because we are broken hearted. The peace and joy of Christmas is not just for fun, but because we need it. We need the healing for our sorrows, the mercy in our terror, the company in our wanderings. Christ comes to be with us because we are lost, and searching, and alone. Sometimes, like his parents, we feel like we have lost the Holy Child with us or within us. We feel death’s shadow. But the good news is that we haven’t lost God; we are not alone; death does not have the last word. The light of Christmas shines on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.
For many people the ribbons of Christmas are braided with sorrow. And this year it has been for us, too. My wife Beth’s youngest sister Paula passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last weekend, two days before Christmas. Family is gathered, yet sundered, both lost and united. We have been more aware than usual that the promise of Christmas is not happy times; the promise is that God is with us, even in the sorrowful times. Sometimes we have to search for three days to know it. But when we return to the sacred center, we find that it is we who have wandered, who have not seen the presence of God. We are not alone. And death never has the last word.
There will be sorrows and fears; there will be times when we feel without God. But “after three days”―beyond the appearances of time and space― we will be reunited with the Beloved, and we will find ourselves in a holy place.
This Christmas pray for all those who do not yet see light in their lives, who are in sorrow, or searching and feel alone.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
The world today needs people who have been shaken by ultimate calamities and emerged from them with the knowledge and awareness that those who look to the Lord will still be preserved by him, even if they are hounded from the earth.
– Father Alfred Delp (condemned as a traitor for his opposition to Hitler, Delp, a Jesuit priest, wrote these words from a Nazi prison shortly before being hanged in 1945)
A sparkly little Snowman
Brightens up my phone
He wears a little santa hat
the cutest little grin
I smile each time I see him
and he smiles right back at me
He puts me in the Christmas mood
When life just gets me down
And even tho he’s just a photograph
I think he knows my name
He glitters and he twinkles
As happy as a clown
And even when I have to cry
He never has a frown
So thank you little snowman
For being awfully sweet
This Christmas is much better
With you right here with me
al 12/22/12
If we can’t ever fly from God, if God could show up anywhere— then when it’s exactly most unlikely for Him to come to us — it is most like Him to come to us right then.
it’s almost be this moan on the wind:
“I just wanted you to remember me….”
“When I was hungry — did you remember Me?
When I was hollowed out and emptied out and worn right out — did you remember Me?
When I was thirsty for water, parched for fresh grace, bone dry for the real Body of Christ — did you remember Me?”
Oh Child.
Oh, Christ Child.
And we go home from the manger to our tree, the scent of God still on us.
We are born in time, still, to embrace the Christ Child: we can hold Christ now in every hurting person we hold.
Did I give You food when You were hungry?
Did I give You water when You were thirsty?
Did I remember You at all this Christmas, Child who bore the Tree?
And on a spinning orb of Christmas Trees, our hearts can pound yes — our limbs and light and love reaching straight out…
– Ann Voskamp http://www.aholyexperience.com/ (edited)
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 a proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so please, 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 her child’s scrawl were the words, “I done it for love.”
When the 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. When interrogated as to why we hung out at a stable, why we were detained by a baby in swaddling clothes, may we answer, “We done it for love.”
– Brennan Manning
Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.
– Gerald Manley Hopkins
God often loves us with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be. With our advanced degrees, armies, government programs, material comforts and self-fulfillment techniques, we assume that religion is about giving a little of our power in order to confirm to ourselves that we are indeed as self-sufficient as we claim.
Then this stranger comes to us, blesses us with a gift, and calls us to see ourselves as we are – empty-handed recipients of a gracious God who, rather than leave us to our own devices, gave us a baby.
– William Willimon
the gift of generosity and compassion,
the gift of humility, of trust, of joy.
Pray for the gift of gentleness,
the gift of a healing spirit.
Put the gifts you want for Christmas
on your list, and let God know.
Think of them as you’re shopping.
Ask deliberately for them,
and they will come,
secretly, in the night.
For Christ will come
and find shelter in your heart,
whether or not you leave milk and cookies.
And even though I’ve promised,
you’ll still be surprised.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
The Winter Solstice
This year Winter will start on December 21 at 6:12 – the earliest since 1896!
Winter inspires both joy and woe. Some people can’t wait for the cooler weather, snow, skiing and ice skating, curling up by a fire, and the holiday spirit. Other people dislike the frigid temperatures, blizzards, and wild weather.
The word solstice comes from the Latin words for “sun” and “to stand still.” In the Northern Hemisphere, as summer advances to winter, the points on the horizon where the Sun rises and sets advance southward each day; the high point in the
Sun’s daily path across the sky, which occurs at local noon, also moves southward each day. At the winter solstice, the Sun’s path has reached its southernmost position. The next day, the path will advance northward. However, a few days before and after the winter solstice, the change is so slight that the Sun’s path seems to stay the same, or stand still. The Sun is directly overhead at “high-noon” on Winter Solstice at the latitude called the Tropic of Capricorn. In the Northern Hemisphere, the solstice days are the days with the fewest hours of sunlight during the whole year.
http://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-winter-winter-solstice
New Newsletter issue on Winter over on the website, to get you in the Holiday mood!!! – http://songsfromthevalley.com/
life: acoustic & amplified 