The desert fathers withdrew from ordinary society and sought the solitude of the desert. This was the first step in their ‘spirituality’. Then they placed themselves under spiritual fathers. After that, the daily life was their prayer, and it was a radically simple life: a stone hut with a roof of branches, a reed mat for a bed, a sheep-skin, a lamp, a vessel for water or oil. It was enough.
It was not until I became part of the leadership of the Montgomery bus protest that I was actually confronted with the trials of life. Almost immediately after the protest had been undertaken, we began to receive threatening telephone calls and letters in our home.
A voice from heaven tells Jesus he is a beloved son who is well pleasing. Close your eyes. Silently or aloud say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Then in your mind’s eye, see Jesus and imagine his unspoken response.
Christ is bathed in light; let us also be bathed in light. Christ is baptized; let us also go down with him, and rise with him.
When God created man, in order to commend more highly the good of society, he said: “it is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like unto himself.” It was from no similar, nor even from the same, material that divine Might formed this help mate, but as a clearer inspiration to charity and friendship he produced the woman from the very substance of the man.
The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak—even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere.
The ‘unity,’ then, ‘of the Spirit,’ to which the apostle exhorts, includes both; both concord in mind and affections, and love of charitable unity, which comes from the Spirit of God, and returns to it. And, indeed, the grace of God’s Spirit is that alone which makes men truly at peace and unity one with another.
Julia Chester Emery is not the kind of person one expects to meet in a calendar of religious commemorations, in part because of the nature of her accomplishments. Her story does not involve extraordinary feats of courage, neither was she tortured or executed for reason of her faith.
St. Andrew’s Mission at Stephen’s Village on the Yukon River between Fort Yukon and Rampart, deserves a special word because its actual starting was the result of a really clamorous importunity on the part of the Indians themselves. So long as the white man’s town of Rampart was large enough to warrant a resident missionary, Stephen’s Village, with its native catechist, was visited from that post, eighty miles away.
The story of the magi ranks right up there with the Christmas and Easter stories in terms of snaring the human imagination. Poets as distinct as William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams have wrapped words around the visit of the wise men. Longfellow even gave them names: Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. Hundreds of artists have painted the scene, including Botticelli and Fra Angelico.