People love to tell you, when you’re expecting your first child, all about how much becoming a parent is going to change you. About how your world is going to turn upside down, and you’re never going to be the same again. But I found that I changed far more, and learned far more (about myself and about God), with the birth of my second child, than with the birth of my first.
God is light, and to those who have entered into union with him he imparts of his own brightness to the extent that they have been purified. When the lamp of the soul, that is, the mind, has been kindled, then it knows that a divine fire has taken hold of it and inflamed it. How great a marvel! Man is united to God spiritually and physically, since the soul is not separated from the mind, neither the body from the soul.
New for Sunday Social Hour: We’ll post a question on Facebook (and Twitter, once we get the hang of this) to get your feedback, and then on Sunday we’ll round up the answers (as best we can when there are a lot). This week’s question: What have you seen this Advent and Christmas season that has moved you?
A pattern of violence initiated through Christmas Eve bomb attacks that killed 32 and injured more than 70 continues to resound in Jos, capital city of Nigeria’s Plateau State.
“I have a distaste for people who say to me if you come through these doors, walk down this aisle, sit on that wooden bench, and sing these hymns in this order, I have got God in a little bottle under my pulpit and I’ll let you have a look… I don’t think [that] was God’s intention.”
The people of Quinhagak, Alaska, have fun with the Hallelujah chorus.
“If Americans are going to church at the rate they report, the churches would be full on Sunday mornings and denominations would be growing,” wrote C. Kirk Hadaway, now director of research at the Episcopal Church.
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.
Nurslings of purity and disciples of chastity, raise we our hymn to the Virgin-born God with lips full of purity. Deemed worthy to partake of the flesh of the Spiritual Lamb, let us take the head together with the feet, the Deity being understood as the head, and the Manhood taken as the feet.
The toll from violent explosions in Nigeria and the Philippines is still being counted today. Coordinated attacks on churches and in other areas were Christians