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The season of Epiphanytide, those two to six weeks that hinge on the date of Easter have always been about light and dark, the light of truth and the dark of lies. For us in Northern California it is a winter season, which seems appropriate, given the dark stormy skies broken at times by a piercing sun, low, close to the horizon. The winter sun, traveling in a lower arc over fewer hours in the day seems clearer and more brilliant than it does in other seasons, nearly blinding at times.

And so it is an appropriate time to hear Gospel lessons that heal our blindness, show us who this Jesus of Nazareth was and is, who he claimed to be. The first Sunday is the account of Jesus in the temple, the second Sunday is the baptism of Jesus, the third Sunday is the miracle of the water turned to wine (first miracle), the fourth Sunday is two miraculous healings (leprosy and palsy), the fifth Sunday is the parable of the harvesting the wheat and the burning of the tares (a dire warning), and the sixth Sunday is the parable of the laborers in the field (the last shall be first and the first shall be last). Today was the account of Jesus baptized by John, and the Holy Spirit descending upon him like a dove, and a voice from Heaven saying, “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

As I work through the first draft of my novel-in-progress, I rely on an hour on a Sunday to be healed by Christ once again. So we confess our failings, our sins of the week, we repent, and we receive forgiveness from God the Father through his Son and his Church. Much is said today about forgiveness and not much about confession and repentance. And yet we are told they go together, depend upon one another. Forgiveness cannot happen without repentance, turning away in a new direction, changing. To be healed of blindness one must change and no longer live in darkness but in light. We want to be the wheat and not tares when Christ comes again, or when we find ourselves at the end of life on Earth. Christ gathers the wheat and burns the tares. Seems pretty clear.

Change is challenging. Change is a rebirth of our souls again and again, until we are whole, holy. Today we are weak creatures. Tomorrow, will we be weaker or stronger? Will our hearts burn with love or hate? What path are we following? Toward the light or the dark? How do we know?

We go to church and we listen, mark, and inwardly digest the words of the preacher, the words of Scripture, and the words of life as the Word becomes present again in the Host and the wine.

Mystery and miracle! Such gifts are found in a humble manger where the Son of God is born to us today, yesterday, and tomorrow. We feed on these great gifts of the Church and, like the wheat in the field, we grow toward the light. The weeds will try and grow too, but without direction and purpose, and one day they will be thrown into the fire.

In my novels, I try to capture these mysteries and miracles of life, all around us, in us, for us. We are creatures of good and evil. Do we want to be creatures of only good? Do we want to be healed? Do we want to see truth, know truth? If so, we need feeding so that we will confess, repent, and be forgiven. 

I thought about these things in our little chapel in Berkeley this morning as the sun shafted in upon the crucifix and the altar, and the organ boomed gloriously. I thought how simple it really was, this business of seeing, and yet how difficult it was for many folks to be simple as a child, as a baby in a manger under a bright star of the heavens. How simple to say, I’m sorry, Lord. For an hour we sang together. We spoke the words of the liturgy as one body and were fed by Scripture, sermon, and Eucharist. But we also prayed to God the Father that we acknowledged and bewailed our manifold sins… committed by thought, word, and deed. We repented earnestly and were heartily sorry! No longer did we want to remember them, for they were an intolerable burden… We cried for mercy to the Father for the Son’s sake, to be forgiven. We wanted to live in newness of life to the Father’s honor and glory.

At some point we recited the Ten Commandments and the wonderful response to each one, Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law, and lastly, write all these thy laws in our hearts, we beseech thee. Dear Lord, help is needed, please. Dear Father, incline our hearts! Write the laws on our hearts! Help is needed from Almighty God, our Heavenly Father.

And we sang hymns as the organ trilled, making a joyful noise that rose over the altar to the crucifix and beyond through the clerestory windows, sanctifying the town of Berkeley.

Like Jesus rising from the waters of baptism, we rise too, for we have been baptized into Christ and his bride, the Church, so that one day we will hear the words from our Father in Heaven, “Thou art my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.”

The Word in Your Heart: Mary, Youth, and Mental Health by Francis Etheredge (St. Louis, MO: EnRoute Books and Media, 2024)

Reviewed by Christine Sunderland

In this collection of prose, poetry, and prayer, Francis Etheredge, bioethicist, theologian, and philosopher, invites us on a pilgrimage through words and pages, interweaving meditations on the Virgin Mary as protective mother to all, the truth of the human person, and the challenges young people face in today’s materialistic and divisive world. The common answer to these vital questions is found in the Word implanted in our hearts, meaning Holy Scripture to be sure, but also the action of God in history and today, the Word made flesh who dwells among us.

 And so, on this journey, we meet Christ and his healing power, for Etheredge has placed the Word in our hearts. We learn about The Neocatechumenal Way, an evangelistic group within the Roman Catholic Church, established in the 1960s, and giving life to parishes by promoting family, eucharist, and community, proclaiming the love of Christ. The Way changed Etheredge and brought him back to Christ and the Church and, on this journey, we see why and how and the importance of growing in a community of persons and words and sacraments, and thus living more fully the time we are given.

The pilgrimage is for real and not mere metaphor: Francis Etheredge and his family of eight join a pilgrimage of youth from London to Lisbon, stopping at Nemours, Lourdes, Pamplona, St. Francis Xavier’s home, Santiago de Compostella, and Fatima. We encounter Mary’s appearances and experience her help and direction. We learn of St. Ignatius, St. James, and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). We see the power of God working, miracles and more miracles, as we mourn the suffering of the innocent in not only the Holocaust of World War II but in Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and today’s slaughter of the unborn.

The power of God reforms and recreates and burnishes:

“The Lord, like a craftsman, then, takes our whole history and makes a stained-glass window of even the scraps and pieces that we would be happier if they were in someone else’s life or no one’s! But, as beautiful light transfigures everything into a blazing pattern of the Lord’s glorious, redeeming love, let us hope to rejoice that we can see how God has blessed us and that the love of God can show through the whole of our life and so help others.” (76)

Etheredge’s fervent faith is tangible, as is his deep concern for the “needs of young people today!” Thus, he speaks of the Virgin Mary, the power of pilgrimage, the human person, and the love of God seeking to heal the broken hearts and bodies of the young, born into our nihilistic world, an age at war with the spirit of man and the Spirit of God. “This is a book about the power of God to change a man’s life…” he begins, as he shares his own conversion at age forty, one that led him to greater and greater awareness that God had a vocation for him and every unique and holy person.

He writes of the contemplative nuns at The Monastery of Our Lady of Bethlehem:

 “Given, then, that the Eucharist, and being able to see the Blessed Sacrament from where they lived in their hermitages, was central to their life, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the ‘Monstrance of the Lord’ comes, it seems, almost to take on flesh in the day-to-day life which these sisters lived: a reciprocal discovery of the mystery of God and of the self – both in community and in the solitariness of their monastic vocation.” (42)

Etheredge’s prose reads like a conversation, an enthusiastic and compelling conversation that answers questions crucial to life and death. Between the conversations and the catecheses he gave during the pilgrimage, lives powerful poetry, rendering depth to the words and offering new ways of seeing. To be sure, within these pages Francis Etheredge offers theology and bioethics for the layperson.

In many ways this is not only words that open doors to places never visited, but it is a rosary (Etheredge’s image) that strings together moments of reflection, instruction, encouragement, and visions of Mary, prayers to live in our hearts, guiding the young (and old) on the next leg of their journey.

Words have power. Here, we see theology incarnated on the page, so that we witness the true nature of the human person, ideas taking on flesh. We ask, what is man? Body, mind, spirit? Can these be divided as is done in today’s materialistic culture where drugs become the answer and then the problem? Is wholeness lost, a holy wholeness, no longer taught to our children? How can we know that wholeness? How can we know our true selves? Francis Etheredge, in these remarkable reflections, grounds theology in reality, and touches us with truth.

And what are the real crises of our youth? Etheredge suggests one is perfectionism, including “body shaming” and the false need for plastic surgery. We see the necessary role of humor in mental health and how to find a harmony of the heart, mind, and body. We consider how the Internet “fashions fashion,” how body parts are for sale, embryos frozen, and the dignity of human life assaulted. All these factors encourage suicide. We question the treatment of mental health problems with drugs, creating side-effects that require more drugs. Shouldn’t we deal with the root causes of abortion and be honest about the true costs to mother, father, family, and society? What is gender confusion? Shouldn’t we listen to the whole of who we are and are called to be? Shouldn’t we be pilgrims, learning the vocation God has ordained for us, rather than what we have planned, or society demands.

Francis Etheredge has words for doctors: they must abide by their oath “to do no harm.” They must treat the whole human person – body, mind, and spirit – interrelated and integrated. For when only part of the person is treated, depression and euthanasia are not far behind.

And as in all of Etheredge’s works, there is goodness and beauty and truth. Weave them into your own heart. For words point to ideas unseen and feelings behind the ideas. Words do this, just as the Word, the Son of God, did this on that first Christmas in a stable in Bethlehem, bringing life and light and hope to a world of death and darkness and despair. Just so, that same Word that came in the beginning, then made flesh, enters our hearts today, bringing life and light and hope to all, especially those confused and suicidal and looking for God in all the wrong places.

One of the right places to find God is in the Church:

“The vocation of the Church is to take us towards heaven, uniting us as we travel there with the host of heaven; and, making good use of our talents and what we do in this life, if what we do is of God, then what we do is already impregnated with the golden destiny of eternal life – however hidden this reality is from us or from others.” (41)

Life is a pilgrimage from birth to death to life in Heaven. We are all pilgrims walking through time, and as pilgrims we search for meaning and for God. As pilgrims we learn to pray and take part in the greatest conversation of all, the Creator with his Creation.

And one last word… I continue to marvel at Francis Etheredge’s pulling together many genres into one book – essay, instruction, poetry, memoir, travel journal, history, even hagiography. Publishers often demand their separation, so that librarians and booksellers and marketers can tag them, shelve them, and brand them. Francis Etheredge defies them all with a certain faith that his writings have their own wholeness, their own life, their own vocation, their own shelf, their own brand, uniquely ordained by God.

Enter this world of truth and beauty. It’s a good place to be, even on a pilgrimage of words, following and welcoming the Word into your heart.

Francis Etheredge is a Catholic theologian, writer, and speaker, living in England. He is married, with eight children, plus three in heaven. Mr. Etheredge holds a BA Div, an MA in Catholic Theology, a PGC in Biblical Studies, a PGC in Higher Education, and an MA in Marriage and Family. He is author of 11 books on Amazon: Amazon UK    Amazon US   

Visit Francis Etheredge at his website and at Linked-In for book news and blog posts.

Christine Sunderland serves as Managing Editor for American Church Union Publishing. She is the author of seven award-winning novels about faith and family, freedom of speech and religion, and the importance of history and human dignity. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and a white longhair cat named Angel.

An epiphany is a revealing, a manifestation, and in this epiphany of Christ to the gentiles the good news of the saving love of God is revealed to those who were not Jewish – the rest of the world, to you and me. Magi, wise men, astrologers, followed a star that they knew was a portent of a great king to be born. As some say today, they followed the science.

I find it curious that the January 6 rally in 2021 in Washington D.C. was on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord. The rally and protest, hoping to recount the electoral votes, that became disruptive has been proven to my satisfaction to be just that, and no where near an “insurrection.” Innocent citizens have since been arrested, jailed, and in the process had their livelihoods destroyed, their families victimized. The witch hunt was and is a dark moment in our history, and all because concerned citizens voiced their doubts that the 2020 presidential election was a fair and free election. Since that time, courts have refused to hear the case that ballots were fraudulent, that the dead rose and voted, that imaginary folks became citizens, that illegal shenanigans of many stripes cast grave questions on the integrity of the election. Over the last three years video tapes of the event and FBI whistleblowers testify that those doubts were and are well founded. Today, we live in fear that the government will raid our homes in the middle of the night for no justifiable reason than to set examples. Sounds like Stalin and Mao to me.

Americans seek the light of truth. They desire to know what really happened on that wintry day in Washington DC. They want to know if there was election interference in the fall of 2020. They seek the light, the light of revelation, the light of truth.

Just so, we seek the light of Christ. Who was this man? What does his birth, life, death, and resurrection mean for us? We ask again and again, for the answers are many and all one and the same – he is the Son of God, come to save us from sin and death. When he rises at Easter, we rise too.

And just so, we must bear the burden of his cross, for to love is to suffer, to deny oneself out of love for another. This is the light of Jesus, and it is a bright and revealing one.

There is a great realignment in our country, because of our government’s persecution of the innocent, an unequal justice under the law. My generation – the early boomers – studied history and civics and what it means to be an American in this great and unique country. Some of us are waking up to this war of the woke upon the average citizen. We see several generations who praise Stalin, Mao, and Hitler for they don’t seem to be aware of the one hundred million killed in the twentieth century under these regimes. Some of us are waking to the woke.

And so the light of Christ shines upon our country, our country founded on the Judeo-Christian ethos – love of neighbor, of justice, of the law. The star shines upon our earth, giving light to those who wish to see. For we are free still, and we can still choose to see or not to see.

When the light of Christ shines, when that Epiphany star beckons us to Bethlehem and to the cross, we see in a whole new way. We see that we are so uniquely different from one another. No two persons are alike. I find this to be a great marvel and mystery. We know so much about genes today – the full information helix ladders that define each person from conception – and yet even so, people continue to enthrall me. Those I have known for a time, I see in the light of Christ new features, new qualities, delicate and beautiful, wise and wonderful, thoughtful and full of thoughts. Those I meet for the first time offer a universe of detail, a book of life, a sculpture of many dimensions. All of life is a canvas of incredible beauty and stunning composition.

To not appreciate such light is to live in the dark. Again, our own choice.

But when you choose the light, there is no going back, for the joyful adventure you will embark upon will be greater with each turn of the path and page, each sacrament, each prayer, each moment we say “yes” to the will of God in our lives. The more we say yes, the greater the joy.

The star of Epiphany burns bright. We need only follow it, to see. We need only turn away, to be blind. The star enlightens our world, showing us the truth of who we are, past, present, and future. The star makes sense of it all.

And all across our exceptional land of America, the star is shining, revealing, birthing prophecy. Be not afraid, for God loves us, each and every one.

***

For an excellent summary of January 6, 2021 in WDC by a witness to the rally, check out Jeff Minick’s articles at Intellectual Takeout, and for numerous videos along with other witnesses and whistleblowers, see the Epoch Times.

We are in the midst of Christmastide, the twelve days of Christmas, spanning Christmas Day to the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6. During this holy time that turns the corner of the old year and slips into the new, we try and make sense of the stupendous events of Christmas.

Christmas reminds us, as we act it all out in our lives, that God became man and lived among us. How could this be? He loves us so.

And so the Church sings the glories of Heaven meeting Earth, tells the story of Incarnation, humility, and majesty. Each stroke of the painting, each phrase of the poem, each note and word of the carol, relives the story so that we will not forget, for we must not forget.

Familiarity has bred forgetfulness, however, and we say words by rote, sing songs without thought, observe holiday rituals from hollow habit together or alone. Other gods have replaced the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Other imperatives have replaced the laws of the Creator of the Universe. Sirens pull us away from truth, away from the glories of Christmas.

And so we look for the star that will bring us to where we want to be. We follow the star to Bethlehem, to Nazareth, to the child that will change the world with love.

But as we follow the star, we step through the twelve days of Christmas, recalling saints who knew the Lord of all, Stephen the first martyr, John the great evangelist. Then, abruptly, we halt in midweek to remember The Holy Innocents, the slaughter of the children, 2 and younger, by Herod, searching for Jesus. It is a shock. Not all was silent and not all was holy when the Son of God came to Earth. The light of life entered the dark of death. For us.

Recalling the loss of these innocents, our journey through Christmastide takes us by surprise. The shock and the brutality of these true events in history, revealing the true nature of mankind, the true mourning of Rachel weeping for her children, brings us face to face with the dark, the reason the Christ Child was born, our need for a Savior.

We look back to October 7, 2023, another slaughter of innocents, and we mourn anew. We look toward January and recall the slaughter of the unborn, claiming 100 million lives in the course of five decades of death, and so many generations lost. We have slaughtered our future and armed the present with danger. We have become Rachel weeping for our children.

And so, having allowed such holocausts we have opened the door to suicide, addiction, and violence, to silencing and censoring, to lies believed and truth denied.

Yet those of us who believe in the Child of Bethlehem are immune from the dark, from death. We have been vaccinated by God-in-flesh, Jesus Christ. With Christ we are born again and again, as we repent again and again, so that when he knocks, we open the door of our hearts once more. We see the star and in its light we see the path through the dark of the world. We know our destination; we know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We cry to Our Lord, on our knees, to save us from these sins, to save our people, to save our families, to lead us out of the wilderness of death. We cannot do this alone. We need our God with us, in us.

We sing our songs, and we harken to angels singing with us around the creche, these twelve days of Christmas. The magi are coming from afar bearing gifts, for they see the light too. We join together in the Church, Christ’s bride, and form a rosary of prayer and petition and offering. 

In the dark of winter on this last day of the year, we step into time, telling the Story of Glory, the story of Love Incarnate, the story to redeem all stories, as we birth the savior in the creche of our hearts.

It has not always been obvious to me that Christmas trees were more Christian than pagan. They are a Germanic tradition, popularized by Queen Victoria (from one of the German states) in nineteenth-century England. To be sure, the lights festooned through the branches (originally real candles) create a magical sense of another world, one we long for but cannot see. But I wanted more of the Good News of Christmas, so I often placed a creche at the base or nearby, thinking surely this is the true meaning of Christmas.

Yet now I see that the Christmas tree seemed to be our way of taking earthly things – ourselves and our surrounding natural world – and making them spiritual, fantastic, mysterious, and beautiful, in a sense Godlike. We too, wonder if we could have those lights festooned through our souls, the Holy Spirit blinking in our earthly flesh.

So in a sense the tree, once decorated (don’t forget the lights), reaches for Heaven, the star on top pulling us higher. We gaze into the branches of our pasts, hoping to understand who we are today and who we will become on our journey into tomorrow. We play carols as we look into the depths of the fir and think about the true meaning of Christmas, the Incarnation of the Son of God come among us.

Yet today as we welcomed our tree into our home – a smaller one since we are shrinking with age – and set it in the window, filled the bucket with water, and trimmed the lower branches so the cat would not be tempted, I saw this tree anew and it didn’t even have lights yet.

For it was alive, wasn’t it? And now it has died for us. In the death of the tree, our home was enlivened by fragrance and light. The tree has joined our family for a few weeks, drawing our attention to Christmas Day, helping us focus on the miracle of Christmas. This tree, humble and real and sitting in the window, is our way to Bethlehem. It will light our journey over the next week.

From these simple realities, I added the symbolism of the evergreen tree in our glorious story of Christ Jesus. For there was an earlier tree, we are told, at the beginning of time, a tree with forbidden fruit. It was the tree that stood in that first garden, Eden. It saw the woman Eve approach; it saw the snake Lucifer curl around the woman, whispering into her ear; it heard the words to disobey God and achieve godlike knowledge; It saw her take a bite and offer the fruit to Adam; it saw humanity fall into disease and death.

We are told by theologians that the tree reappears on Golgotha, that hill outside Jerusalem, many years later. It is on the wood of a tree that Christ Jesus cancels the Fall, raising us up with him in his resurrection. And so on Good Friday we meditate upon the wood of the cross, thinking of Eden and the wood of that other tree with its forbidden fruit. Mary becomes the new Eve, crushing the serpent at her feet.

The images of salvation weave a rich tapestry in time and into eternity. The more we read and the more we study and the more we listen to our preachers and teachers, the deeper we go into the ever-greenness of those fir branches. We, like the children of Lewis’s Narnia, enter the closet of furs and emerge into the world of eternal life.

As I loop strings of lights on our tree, I will think of the light of Bethlehem – the star over the stable, and the Christ Child in the manger. But I will also think of the tree of life that became the tree of death and then life again.

All so we could come with him. All so we could live eternally within his love, the love of God. If we choose to, that is.

And as I nest a few ornaments in the branches, I will see my past in the greenery, just as my past forms my present and informs my future.

And as I hear the words sung by a choir of faithful, It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old…, or perhaps Silent night, holy night…, I will know I have one foot in Heaven already. Perhaps it is the first rung of a wooden ladder that Jacob saw in his dream.

I will know what we can know, not what we are forbidden to know, and thus I will be protected from evil. I will know the love of God is right here, surrounding me, holding me, leading me through the valleys left in my life, up the mountain to the stars, for even if I walk through the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for he is with me.

Glory is all around us. See it. Hear it. Feel it. Touch it. Believe it is real. Invite Christ into your heart this Christmas and know joy eternally.

“BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.” (Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent, BCP 1928, p. 92)

In this holy season of preparation for Christmas glory, we are focused by ritual and habit, carefully sculpted over a lifetime, rather like an athlete training for a race or a tourist researching a destination, to forge our hearts and minds to welcome the Son of God in a manger in Bethlehem, this Year of Our Lord, 2023.

Even with lockdowns, the Internet, the busy-ness of shopping and decorating, the noise and confusion of our world, the demoralization of recent cosmic events (the butchering of children at home and abroad, from conception to adulthood), and the short attention spans that dwarf our intellect and consciousness, we reach for our Rule of the season to give sight to our blindness, hearing to our deafness, speech to our dumbness, to sanctify this holy time as we should and are called to do.

And so we look to ingest words, to feed on the Word, so that we may confess, repent, and find the path through life that leads to our heavenly Jerusalem. We have gone astray like sheep, following the loudest voice, half asleep with the drug of self, slipping and sliding deeper and deeper into the darkness of our time. And as we add the words of the First Sunday in Advent’s prayer, we cast away those works of darkness and we put upon the armor of light.

Words have always fascinated me, ever since I learned to read. I recall by the age of ten I was reading Dickens along with Nancy Drew, and devouring library books brought home weekly, piled high (we were limited to ten at a time). I recall the delight I felt in anticipation of all those words and what those words would bring me, where they would take me.

For words aren’t just letters strung together, as we all know. They are symbols for something else, something real in our world, colors we see, people we meet, dangers and rescues and puzzles solved. Words enter our heads through our eyes and create places far away or right here. They invite us into their world.

Just so, Holy Scripture tells us of God’s great acts among mankind. It explains where we have come from, where we are today, and where we must go. These words sculpt us to become the person we are meant to be. They are words of life, connecting us with our living Creator here and now. And in this linking, this knowing, this glorious union with the King of Kings, we are protected by his light in our world of darkness.

We hear and read these words of life so that we may not know death, so that we may have hope and comfort. Christ’s words in the Gospel today are cosmic: “there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring, men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of Heaven shall be shaken.” (St. Luke, 21:25+)

Our Lord goes on to describe his Second Coming in a cloud with power and glory. He is warning us of the advent of the last days and to watch and wait and pay attention to the signs all around us, to be ready.

Advent is a time to consider the three great comings of Christ – in a manger in Bethlehem, in our hearts through prayer and Eucharist, and at the end of time. 

History is real. Time is real. Christ is real. He was real in history, and is real now in time through his Spirit. Fear not, for behold we will know great joy when this babe is born in Bethlehem. He will dry our tears and hold us close with his love.

And he will teach us to love, to love one another, should we turn to him to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his words of life.

And we light our second candle, a flame to banish the dark.

Every Advent I re-memorize the prayer – the Collect – prayed daily in the prayer offices of the Church, including the four Sundays in Advent:

“ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.” 1928 Book of Common Prayer, p.90, Thomas Cranmer, 1489-1556, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Henry VIII.

And so I will set up my Advent wreathe tonight, this First Sunday in Advent, and light that first candle.

Advent is a fascinating season, a season of preparation for the greatest of all events in the world, the birth of Christ, and yet it is full of “great humility.” How do you combine the two, greatness and humbleness? To be sure, mankind has turned any remnants of humility into pride, and the festivities often neglect the true festival, the coming of the Son of God, to give life to our world of death.

In this sense, then, Advent has been betrayed by misuse and buried in the attic of our childhoods, so I approach these few weeks quietly and with deepening wonder. For the weeks of Advent are serious ones – with themes of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell to help us face the reality of our lives, of life itself. We consider death, an event that we will all encounter; we learn of judgment, an accounting of our life; we are given hope that our penitence will rebirth our souls and send us to Heaven rather than Hell.

Christians today don’t like to speak of Hell. And yet we see bits of it all around us. We see the darkness in the butchery of children in the recent October 7 attacks, in the transgender kidnappings, in the lives of the unborn snuffed out. 

We see the darkness of Hell in the silencing of Heaven, with attacks on God’s chosen people, on houses of worship, on academic speech.

We live in a dark world, and in Advent we pray to see light, to see the star that will lead us to Bethlehem. That star is there for all to see who are not blind. It is bright with the love of God and the love of mankind. It is our beacon of hope in a world of despair.

And so we follow the star through the season of Advent, learning our Advent Collect to say each day, to add to our morning and evening Our Father who art in Heaven… We want the words on the tip of our tongue, so that we can hold them in our hearts forever.

We look forward to God the Son’s glorious majesty in the world to come, to the Judgment, and to Heaven’s gates opening to us, when we rise to the life immortal. We pray for grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

And so we journey to Bethlehem, to the cave stable, to Mary and Joseph, to the Christ Child in the manger, our only hope of Heaven and our true Light of Life, giving thanks for God’s great acts of salvation among us.

Deo Gratias.

The ordering of chaos has long been a goal of mankind, and long been my own goal, to be sure.

The world often seems chaotic, and yet we see order and meaning in its folds, its wrinkles, the weave of life itself. Those who cannot produce order and meaning in their lives often descend into madness, allowing the chaos to reign.

The order and design of the world – and the universe – is one of the themes of my novel-in-progress, The Music of the Mountain. For music is orderly, if it is to be music and not noise, a judgment that is often subjective, given the cacophony of modern music. Nevertheless, perfect ratios create harmony, and melody pulls the notes into patterns discernable to the human ear.

When Christianity, rooted in Judaism, influenced art, music was musical. Notes painted pictures and meaningful moments. They told stories of heartbreak and heroism, of lives lived in beauty, truth, and goodness. Some of this continues today, in spite of the disorder of atheism and agnosticism, but it remains rooted in Christ and his salvific actions for mankind, a divine order ordained in Eden and destroyed by the Fall of Man, a divine order redeemed and made whole should mankind choose life over death, hope over despair, love over hate, truth over lies.

My bishop of blessed memory often said that Christians are a people of reality. We face truth as best we can straight on, without blinders, so that we do not become blind by our own misguided perceptions and opinions. We look to our truth book, the Bible, to discern reality today, to understand the patterns that underlie and inform all of life. From the historical accounts in Holy Scripture we can discern how we fit into those patterns, how each of us is given unique gifts to live out the art of our own life. We look to the Church to formulate doctrine from these great events recorded in Scriptures, giving these truths shape and meaning that effects our own lives.

When we do this, when we become what and who we are made to be, the canvas of our life makes sense, with its broad strokes and its fine lines. We become a book to be read by those we encounter in our time, just as those we encounter become books for us to read with delight. Each of us is a musical score, a symphony, a harmonic singing of the spheres that joins other notes to form grand choruses.

God is our conductor. There are sections of the orchestra and each one of us is placed from birth where we are meant to be, where our song will be sung, and our glorias will harmonize with the others.

Each one of us is a work of art reflecting and portraying our God of love and his marvelous marvels in time and eternity, living out our divine diversity in all of its beauty and goodness and truth.

Chaos is the result of the Fall of Man, and we live in a world of chaos. And yet, when we search for the truth and see the truth of the human condition we are invited to carve something beautiful out of the chaos, just at God did in the beginning, when he created something out of nothing, filled the void with light and meaning.

There was a time in my life when I rejected belief in the God of Christianity. I was an agnostic, I suppose, and a materialist, that is, all that is real is the material world of matter. C. S. Lewis pulled me out of that suicidal worldview. He pointed to the resurrection of Christ and the logic of belief.

And once you believe that the resurrection most likely happened… there are certain conclusions you cannot escape. Who was/is he? If he was/is who he said he was/is – the God of life and love conquering death – what instructions did he give us? What laws, stories, ways of living did he prescribe?

And so the journey of faith began in my heart, age twenty, fifty-six years ago.

I have learned that the journey cannot be made alone, but must be with others, as prescribed by Christ, that it is a path of continual repentance, absolution, and renewal, that the deeper you go into the love of God in his Church, the deeper you go into beauty and goodness, that the joy of communion with others and with Christ himself in the Eucharist, the greatest of all prayers, is contagious, spreading from one Christian to another, so that when you hear the Psalmist sing, make a joyful noise unto the Lord, you know what he is singing about and you can sing along.

(I have also learned that long sentences reflect the warp and weave of our life in Christ and so I indulge in them often. Indeed, we are long sentences, words birthing phrases with each passing moment, with each turn on the path to Heaven.)

And so today on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I give thanks for the blessings of America, and for the blessings of the Church, the Body of Christ. I give thanks for not being alone on my journey and knowing Christ is beside me, beside us, within me, within us, as we sing our songs, making those joyful noises we call music. We are not alone.

And today is also what has come to be known as “Stir up Sunday” because of the opening prayer in our Elizabethan prayerbook:

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” (BCP 225)

We are stirred up for we enter the season of Advent soon, a season that ushers in Christmas and that miraculous season of giving, of music, of harmony, of love. We are stirred up to prepare for Our Lord’s birth and all that that means for each one of us, when this magnificent God of love took our flesh, became incarnate. Such incarnation incarnates each one of us with Christ himself, his spirit, his love.

And so it goes – the mystery and miracle of words and music and you and me. We follow the star to where it leads, to meaning and purpose and rebirth.

The chaos of the void is no longer a threat, for we have been redeemed by Love.

It’s turned cold here in the Bay Area, with some rain during the week. We live on the edge of turning seasons, a turning of the natural world and a turning of the spiritual world. We rotate with time, as it pulls us ever forward, having spent the past, now spending the present, and soon to spend the future.

For time disappears behind us as if we are traveling on a path through the woods, speeding on a highway that parts the trees, and we glance back furtively to see what we have left behind.

As Christians, nothing is lost, nothing is wasted, and I find that immensely comforting. As my bishop of blessed memory often said, everything counts, nothing is lost, and when I reflected on his words, I would think, that cuts both ways, the good and the bad.

But then when I think of tragedy in the past, I know that is can be remade to our benefit. For suffering does indeed ennoble us, gives us texture and understanding. Suffering teaches us how to love in the midst of pain, and it teaches us how to love the unlovable.

My mother had a fall recently. She is 103, 104 in January, and she mentioned this afternoon that she had been reliving her life in her head. I suppose it is her version of her life – her memory bank. Other versions, perhaps not sanitized versions, might appear in our Life Review when we enter Heaven. Many of those who have died and returned to life give accounts of a Life Review in which we see scenes in our life, possibly triggering regret and repentance.

For at the end of the day, the end of our time, where the dark road through the forest emerges into the bright daylight of Heaven, we recall the miraculous words that open Jerusalem’s gates: I’m sorry. I haven’t loved enough.

I ponder these things as we spin from fall into winter, from Trinitytide into Advent, from Thanksgiving into Christmas. The days grow shorter, the nights darker and crisply cold. The air seems clearer and cleaner, and I’m told that winter’s clarity peaks in January, a good time to ascend Mount Diablo (aka Angel Mountain) and see forever.

And so we approach Thanksgiving and give thanks for our lives on this good planet Earth. We are a part of something, you and I, an integral piece of the cosmic puzzle. We can see our world is beautiful yet corrupt. Our flesh is good but it decays. Our loves decay. We must be on guard to love more and not less, to give more and not less, lest we shrivel into something not so integral, a piece of dust in a galaxy of time. How do we do this? How do we turn evil into good? Hate into love?

We cannot do it alone.

We open our hearts to our Creator and invite him in. Come into my heart, dearest Lord Jesus. Come in and live there, plant seeds of life, turn my decay into glory.

We live in a miracle, the miracle of America, where freedom does indeed ring. It is up to pull the heavy rope at the base of the belltower to ring the golden notes of freedom across our land. We pull and let go, pull and let go, pull and let go. The bell swings in the tower, calling the lost and forlorn to our shores, to enjoy equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal expression.

Each one of us then glories in our uniqueness, for no two of us are the same. We are dignified and sanctified having been created in the image of God, and we join hands to fulfill our purpose, why we were created and what we are meant to do.

We give thanks. We give thanks for those who sailed from distant shores in search of peace, fleeing persecution or poverty or penury. We give thanks for those who offered their time and talent to make this country better, to make this country safer, to make this country the way that the God of Abraham desires it to be. The list is a long one and growing longer – all the men and women over four hundred years who gave themselves to freedom, by responding responsibly to the call to be all that you can be.

We give thanks for all these blessings, and we pray that we do not take them for granted, that we see them the fruit of our prayers and our work and our humility. We see these blessings of the land and our nation as great gifts not to be squandered, but to be understood as cultivated carefully through the generations.

We give thanks for the children and the fathers and mothers who raise them to be in awe of their birth and what the talents given to them in this remarkable country. We see our sons and daughters grow in love and wisdom, feeding on our lessons of life, of lives lived in the past, of deeds done through the years, of the need to plant seeds in fertile soil to reap a good harvest.

We tell the stories of The Little Red Hen, of Chicken Little, of The Boy Who Cried Wolf so that our children learn to value industriousness, truth about skies falling (or not), and sounding false alarms. We heard these stories, and many many more, and we pass them on to our children.

We are thankful for all of these things as we spin from November into December, but most of all we are thankful for life, for the unborn forming and growing and seeing light and breathing those first breaths. We are thankful for death too, oddly and gratefully, as a culmination of our life, a joyous exclamation point that finishes our story, our own Book of Life that we will see one day, opened before us by our dear Lord Jesus.

And we are thankful for our Creator of all, from whom all blessings flow.