It’s here. Whether our advent waiting has grown as heavy as a filling womb or has raced and jittered headlong to a distracted end. Either way it’s here: the close of waiting and the opening of wonder. Because the “it” is a “he”. And, suddenly, we have far less than we wanted and far, far …
Monthly Archives: December 2002
Sunday Week 4 of Advent B
Why here, why now, and why Mary? … I wonder… Maybe, in part, because God has a liking for the edge of nowhere, with the poor, the barren, and the lowly. Maybe that’s why God dodges the palace, dodges the emperors’ city, dodges the learned and the rich and all the mighty in any way. …
December 19th
My brother Phil and his wife Jen discovered a couple of weeks ago that she was pregnant and a second child was on the way, a brother or a sister to my beautiful little niece Becky. Great Advent news! Five days later that little life was lost when Jenny miscarried in the night. What can …
Sunday Week 3 of Advent B
Part of our community Christmas is a gift-exchange … but with a twist. Every one buys something simple, wraps it, and puts the gift under the tree. Then come the day we each draw a number from the hat and the person with number one gets to pick a present and open it. Easy! But …
Saturday Week 1 of Advent (St Ambrose)
Did you notice how over the top Isaiah sounds when he’s trying to raise the expectations of a defeated, disillusioned people? No longer the bread of suffering and the water of distress—instead a world transformed and full of every heart’s desire: water for the thirsty, pasture for the animals, bread to satisfy a hungry soul, …
Wednesday Week 1 of Advent
Anybody here from Birmingham? Good! Sometime in my youth there was a children’s program called ‘Inigo Pipkin’ and its highlight was a puppet pig—who’s name escapes me—who every day, in a bad Brummie accent would shove his snout into his grub and cry with gusto ‘I like food’. ‘I like food.’ I, too, like food …