I spent most of my adult life preparing for Christmas either in the snowy lakeside woods of Nova Scotia or the snowy arid expanse of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Both landscapes were wild and silent. Maybe that’s one reason I still love Christmas. It was preceded by weeks of starry nights and...
Christmas greetings from the Desert Foundation! In a season of darkness, a star glistens. Light bursts from a makeshift crib in a small town in an occupied land on the ragtag margin of an “eternal” empire. Now we can say: The midst of the earth is a raging mirthAnd the heart of the earth a star. --G.K. Chesterton--Art by Leslie McNamara
The photo above shows Advent wreath candles, and we light the pink candle...
We hope your Advent deepened your hope even in the midst of dark times. Now we celebrate the Word made flesh, the great Light that shines on us who have dwelt in darkness and sorrow. Enjoy our brief illustrated celebration of 2023 and our Christmas greeting. And may these next twelve days bring you wonder and gratitude.
I first heard the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe when I was twenty-one. I was considering monastic life and about...
Children, there was a girl. She lived in a small village On a tall dry mesa the size of ours. She did what you do. But her ears heard more than sounds. You hear me talk And know I am bigger than my words: They come from inside me. This girl heard a word, But it wasn’t inside her. She was inside the word. She stayed as still as the Stone canyon walls, And let herself be spoken. That word, which made The desert and the sky, The mesas and the arroyos, The rain and the girl, That great word of our...
For centuries, Christians have prayed special verses called "Oh Antiphons" during the week before Christmas. Each verse begins with the word Oh and uses images from the Jewish Testament to ask God to come into our midst as "Emmanuel," God-with-us. Tessa Bielecki beautifully introduces the context for the antiphons here and presents the antiphons here in a form that can be prayed either alone or with others. My own idiosyncratic take on the antiphons, using animal images for Christ, grew out...
What does a kiss mean? It means one thing to a baby, something else to a bride, and something different to Judas. We might call a kiss a depth symbol. Depth symbols are not literal. They are fraught with connotations, allusions, memory, emotion, mystery, history. They’re more like chords than single notes. They don’t mean simply one thing....
I grew up in a Protestant family, so I learned about Roman Catholic feast days such as Candlemas when I was in college and began going on retreats at the Spiritual Life Institute’s Nada Hermitage in Sedona, Arizona. I discovered the feasts that followed Christmas and loved the reading from Isaiah that accompanied the Epiphany mass. With its...
Christmas will be all the merrier this year because our little “community” of four in what I call the...