…Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2:19 If you want the Christian life in a nutshell, I’m not sure you could do much better than this famous verse from Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth, which ascribes two related but distinct actions to Mary. She ponders. That doesn’t mean that … More Twelve Days: Ponder and Treasure
I’m mildly proud of myself for getting almost all the way through a twelve-day Christmas devotional series before even mentioning the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” But here on day eleven, I’ve been thinking about the apocryphal story that the song originated as a kind of catechism for English Catholics to teach their children … More Twelve Days: Pipers Piping
At the stroke of midnight in the midwinter cold, the new year begins in darkness. When the morning breaks, the world will appear unchanged, grey and still, with long months of short days yet to come. Still, it is new. All around us is a slow resurrection. Not the turn of a calendar page, but … More Twelve Days: The Light Shines
Coming out of a year as scary as 2020, fear doesn’t sound all that Christmasy. After all, one of the great canticles of Advent celebrates that Christ’s coming fulfills God’s promise that “we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke … More Twelve Days: The Fear of the Lord
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to … More Twelve Days: A Season for Everything
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” Matt 2:1-2 At this time of the church … More Twelve Days: King of Kings
If Advent is a season of anticipation and Lent one of introspection, then Christmas is one of adoration, as so many of its best loved songs make clear. It’s a quiet time of tender reverence, as we imagine ourselves in the little town of Bethlehem (“how still we see thee lie”) on a silent night … More Twelve Days: “Heaven and Nature Sing”
Why is Christmas the shortest season in the Christian calendar? I think it’s partly because of a relative silence in the New Testament. The season that starts with the birth of Christ would naturally be the time to learn about the years immediately following Nativity, but the Bible says almost nothing about Jesus’ childhood, adolescence, … More Twelve Days: Jesus’ Sisters and Brothers
Despite what some members of my own family think, It’s a Wonderful Life is the best Christmas movie ever made. Not the cheeriest, but the best. But as I watched it again this Christmas Eve, it struck me that what makes it “the best” has changed for me over my own life. When I was … More Twelve Days: A Wonderful Life?
One of the Christmas Eve services I attended virtually on Thursday, the late one at my father-in-law’s church, began with chronology: (he’s a Lutheran, but this comes from a Catholic source) The Twenty-fifth Day of December… …in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees; in the … More Twelve Days: The Fullness of Time
The Pietist Schoolman 