Coming Back to the Heart of Christmas
When I wrote “The Perfect Christmas” meditation 15 years ago, my objective was to de-emphasize the pressure of an idyllic, curated holiday. The goal? To make peace with my reality and peel back the Hallmark veneer and meet baby Jesus face to face “unplugged.” That meant a shift within me. In my heart I thought it was a “one and done” kind of thing. Yet once again I feel yet another shift from the brisk winds of change. I’m coming back to the heart of Christmas in a way I didn’t realize I needed to do. All this month, I’ve been thinking about the praise song “The Heart of Worship”…
An Advent of Yearning: Reconciling Loss With Gain
Honestly, is it really beginning to look a lot like Christmas? Methinks not, as Charles Dickens might have said. These days, the calendar and the commercials remind us. And we may be getting our decorations up. And for those of us who prepare our hearts for the Christ Child’s arrival, we can look for cues in carols and readings. Yet our hearts long for so much more. Because we are, in this, an advent of yearning, reconciling loss with gain. Preparing Our Hearts Means Inventorying Losses and Gains This reckoning is twofold. Advent is indeed a season of anticipation. It consists of the four Sundays preceding Christmas. Generally defined, it…
