The idea of a penitential season before Christmas doesn’t play too well with ordinary civilians. Thanks to centuries of bad p.r., the whole idea tends to sound to the average person experiencing loss like a church plan to kick a person who’s already down while everybody else is out whooping it up with Christmas sales and eggnog.
Pope Benedict XVI used an annual end of the year address to say that the protection of the environment is directly linked to defending “traditional” marriage against gay rights, especially gay marriage.
Episcopal Churches bring comfort to the grieving and the homeless over Christmas.
For Christmas, the Archbishop of Canterbury remembers Karl Barth who preached in 1931 about the action of God which is not based on principles but
If you’ve ever remodeled a house while attempting to live in it, you have a sense of the chaos and complexity of congregational renewal. It will take far longer, cost you more, and prove messier than you ever imagined at the start. The difficulty lies in the work itself. Pogo’s line holds true here: “We have met the enemy and he is us.
Let us rise in early morning.
Reconciliation’s plan devising,
Fellow-sharer of the Father’s Throne,
Thee, O Christ, we, very early rising,
Tender lover of our spirits, own!
It took me until this Advent to realize that anxiety – far from being a perennial nuisance – is an essential part of this season. It coincides with all the world collapsing, the failure of sound reason, the growing darkness, and all our best-made plans falling to pieces. Advent anxiety connects with our most profound fears that we don’t really have it figured out, whatever “it” is.
I suspect even the jolliest vicar at Christmas feels like an accountant at the end of the tax year. This is not simply fatigue, but frustration with the gap between what we think we are doing and what those unwonted full houses think they are doing.
Religious tolerance is a necessary but overrated virtue. Its practice comes easiest to the religiously indifferent and to the condescending: “You know this is a Protestant country,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded two non-Protestant members of his administration, “and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance.”