The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer offers us a vision—one of many possible visions—of what the Christian life can look like. It’s a vision of a life lived in liturgical time, grounded daily by adaptations of monastic hours of prayer at morning, noon, evening, and night, punctuated by Eucharists on Sundays and Holy Days, of the great transitions—entrance into the church,
When Nicodemus comes to see Jesus, he comes at night, which is probably the writer’s way of saying that he was in the dark or didn’t get it. Nicodemus is interested in Jesus and what he’s teaching, but he can’t get past his usual way of seeing things. “How can I be born again?” he asks. “I’m already a grown-up.”
“Weeping may spend the night,* but joy comes in the morning.” Psalm 30 Evening darkens, grief knocks at my door and moves in for the
The word “martyr,” derived from the Greek martus or “witness,” was originally applied to the first apostles as witnesses of Jesus Christ’s life and, especially, of his resurrection. Slowly it came to be associated with those Christians who had suffered hardship for their faith and eventually was limited to those who suffered death.
But as for me, I have trusted in you, O LORD. * I have said, “You are my God. My times are in your hand;
It should go without saying, but bears repeating anyway, that Jesus and his disciples were all Jews. The Church emerged from Judaism, and was literally born with a Bible in its cradle. The New Testament itself may be seen as a first-century Jewish collection, and it behooves us
It has been said that the lives of the early Christians consisted of “persecution above ground and prayer below ground.” Beneath Rome are the excavations which we call the catacombs, which were at once temples and tombs. Both pagans and Christians buried their dead in these catacombs.
Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; *do not be jealous of those who do wrong.For they shall soon wither like the grass, *and like
Today we remember Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth. In the Magnificat, Mary proclaims her vision of a new world in which the hungry are filled and the lowly are lifted up. Here Monika Hellwig writes that “the dynamics of the prophetic are in the creative imagination. A fundamental task of Christian spirituality is imagination.”