But the soul of the apostolate is deep contemplation and utter prostration before the Other, the unreachable God who became Man, but not man as God King - at least not until he was first the helpless Babe, yes, in a manger. We start to see Christianity itself as a sort of elevated social program and ourselves as mature operators whose meaning can only be found on the plane of activism. We make the mistake of thinking that the Liturgical Year is a mere commemoration, rather than a living contact with the past. We begin to believe that Christmas is something we outgrow that the childlike wonder that loses itself in simple adoration before the crèche is an unworthy response. Misunderstanding Mary leads us to misunderstand Christmas.Yes, the intimate relatability of Mary can help our spiritual life, but if that is the only lens through which we ever view her, we are missing out on the bigger picture. “The idea of Mary as the ‘gate to heaven’ (porta caeli), and the ‘ladder to heaven’ (scala caeli) are both metaphors with an ancient history, but to modern ears they can be surprising.”īecause we are caught in the therapeutic mode of our modern culture, we tend to reduce transcendent realities to projections of the self, ironically destroying, in the process, the very road (or door! or gate!) to freedom and truth. We need to be studying what the Church has always taught about her (and continues to teach in the Liturgy) because our contemporary commentators often have a hold of the wrong end of the stick. A really long piece about the Blessed Virgin, via Anglo-Saxon O Antiphon poetry.I pray that you have a happy Christmas time! God bless you all!
#Christmas bits and pieces full#
(Not pictured: a freezer full of breads, pie crusts (for that tourtière I linked to last week!) and more cookie dough that Habou will attend to today!) I still find myself wondering why, if I’m going to freeze my babkas etc, did I not make them in early December. Tonight, when some more of our family will have arrived, we will decorate the tree.īridget and I have had a lovely week of relatively calm time to get things ready. Is it not so wonderful that we have an Octave of Christmas (a real version of that proverbial “month of Sundays”!) and Twelve Days of Christmas and the Christmas Season! Plenty of time to bask in it all and enjoy the fruits of all our preparations and visiting with friends! Maybe in the next week or so you will have a little time to check out the few links I have here.
The weekly “little of this, little of that” feature here at Like Mother, Like Daughter! (This will all look and work better if you click on the actual post and do not remain on the main page.)
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