Overflowing Happiness

There is another verse from the Christmas story on which I should like to reflect with you - the angels' hymn of praise, which they sing out following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased." God is glorious. God is pure light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of seeing God's glory. Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words, it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendour of God's truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight, together with the angels and the shepherds.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – Oh, this is truly a lovely homily! From the reflections on ‘no room’ at the inn, no room for God, no place for God in our lives and hearts, now we move to what it looks like when God is given room, given His full room, when God is worshipped.

It is joy, beauty, song, goodness. Too often we (and I most definitely include myself here) get a bit racked up with the suffering and sorrow aspect of life. We can easily place just a leetle too much emphasis on the reality of the cross, of death to self, of the struggle with God and with neighbor, the passion of love.

It’s understandable – all that is real, after all, and nothing quite grabs our attention like suffering. But we have to remember that these are not the ultimate realities. And the whole business of giving our lives over to God, of echoing Mary’s fiat, of giving Christ room to grow to full stature—this is not so we can live our lives nailed to a cross!

It is so we can live our lives in perfect joy and gladness. It is so that we can move steadily towards that day ‘when the whole world sends back the song, which now the angels sing.’

Heaven is all joy, all song, all light and love. It is so utterly crucial for us to get this: a life lived for God and God alone is a good life. It is a joyous life. It is a beautiful life. This is so utterly opposite to so much of our modern thinking. To many, the happy joyful life is the life immersed in sensual pleasures or wealth or the exercise of power. But none of that really delivers joy, not real joy, not for long.

Joy comes with love. Joy and peace are the fruit of love, and the only way to live a life of joy and peace is to live a life of love. And yes, in this world love means sacrifice and at least some suffering, but that’s not the point of the exercise.

God is good for us. To worship God is good for us—factually, it is our good. And the song of the angels, the beauty of the manger scene, the adoration of the shepherds and the magi all show us the beauty and goodness of this truth. As we move on from Christmas into the following weeks, let’s not fail to learn what all these mysteries are trying to teach us.

Making Room

There is no room for God. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so "full" of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger.

By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul's exhortation: "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality.

Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – I want to reflect a bit personally today on this section of the Pope’s homily (and the peanut gallery says, ‘And this is different from your usual blogging how?’). My life as a priest in Madonna House, on top of the normal and utterly central sacramental and liturgical ministries every priest does, is in this year of 2013 basically divided into two works.

I am a writer, and I am a spiritual director. In my latter capacity I simply spend an awful lot of time sitting and listening, listening and sitting. The joys, the sorrows, the everyday problems and the life-shaking crises, the spiritual questions and problems of a wide range of people come to me in this daily work that the Lord has asked me to do.

What’s it for? What good is it? People come, they tell me their problems, I might give a little bit of advice, and I pray with them and bless them. I don’t have a magic wand, or a medicine cabinet full of appropriate drugs, or a bank account full of money to throw at the problem (like that always helps). And indeed it is not unknown that people will come to a director month by month, year after year, with roughly the same problems and struggles. Even the most self-assured and faith-assured spiritual director is occasionally going to wonder just what the point is of this particular exercise.

The Pope’s words in this homily struck me in this personal way because I think he precisely expresses what the point is, at least as I understand it, of spiritual direction, but then in the larger sense, of spiritual life, spiritual growth, spiritual striving. It is this: ‘that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing… that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.’

It is not about getting all our problems solved. It is not about getting our act together. It is not about ‘shaping up.’ It is not about any of that. It is about growth in vigilance to hear God, to see God, to recognize Him and respond in love to Him. It is about making room for God in the inn of our hearts.

Sometimes in spiritual direction a primary task is identifying the clutter that is crowding out the manger and suggesting some basic culling and rearranging to free up some space. It is a matter of making a little bit of space so that the baby Jesus can slip in there… and once in there, start to grow, start to take up more space. Next thing you know, more culling and rearranging is needed. A child, a youth, an adult takes up more space than that little baby.

At each step, the heart must be emptied, and only what is still of value put back into it. Finally that baby, that man, that Christ is crucified in the person. A crucified person takes up the maximum space—stretched out, fully extended. Sooner or later, God asks for all the room in our hearts. We thought we could give Him a little corner, a manger to rest in, but now He’s taken over the joint. He wants it all, and will not rest until He has it. He’s like that.

It seems to me that the role of the spiritual director is primarily to help move furniture around, haul things off to the dump, knock down the occasional wall, and constantly and at all times remind the person that it’s all about Jesus, all about making room for Him in our hearts, our lives, and learning to see Him in all things, all situations, all people, especially the ones who demand our love and call us to sacrificial generosity and service.

This is what spiritual life is all about, and this is what I try to serve in my priestly ministry and life.

No Room at the Inn (and, Yes, It is Still Christmas)

Again and again the beauty of this [Christmas] Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.

I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer's almost casual remark that there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores it more deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: "he came to his own home, and his own people received him not" (Jn 1:11).

The great moral question of our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have.

And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the "God hypothesis" becomes superfluous.

Homily, Midnight Mass, Christmas 2012

Reflection – Well the secular world has long moved on from Christmas, which ended at midnight December 25. There was nothing more to buy at that point, and buying and selling is the true driver of secular Christmas. But in the Church we have one more week of the Christmas season, so let’s keep the holly and mistletoe up here at LWAGS and pour another round of eggnog. It is still Christmas.

And so this beautiful homily from midnight Mass, which I would have gotten around to blogging earlier if I hadn’t been away so much this season, is still quite topical. I love the way Pope Benedict links the ‘no room at the inn’ with our modern world’s studied indifference towards God. One of the pitfalls of living in a place like MH is that the young people who come here already, by definition, have an interest in or at least an openness to God. He has a  place in their thinking, or they wouldn’t have found their way to us. We can forget how very foreign all that is to so many today.

On the long train ride back from Halifax I picked up a copy of ‘Canada’s national newspaper’ – essentially our version of the New York Times for youse Americans (and no, I’m not going to dignify it with a name). Faced with 30 hours of traveling, I’ll read anything. On one of its back pages it has a regular feature anyone can write for, a sort of do-it-yourself column. The author of the one I read was a young man essentially agonizing over the meaning of life and his long (25 year!) quest to discover this meaning. He detailed all the different ideas he had come up with for what life might be about, and the inadequacy of them all. He was in a state of some despondency.

Now, at no point in the column—not even in passing, not even to dismiss it—did he so much as broach the idea of God, of religion, of Christ. It was as if that dimension of the question didn’t even suggest itself to him. It was really very striking to me, coming back from a university student conference where 200 of his peers had just given their lives to Jesus. Talk about no room at the inn!

Some of my younger directees have assured me that this is fairly normal. For many young people, God and religion just are not on the menu, not something to even be considered. Even driven by despair, even seeing the futility of all human quests for meaning, as this young man had, there is no room for God. Better to despair than bow down in worship, I suppose.

Meanwhile it is Epiphany, when these wise men, these masters of human learning and lore, did just that—bowed before the foolishness of God which surpasses all human wisdom, the day when ‘those who had worshipped stars learned through a star to worship you, O Sun of Righteousness,’ as the Byzantine hymn puts it.

 

So it is worth taking this last week of Christmas to ponder with the Pope these matters, and in that to make room for God in our own minds and hearts. And that’s quite enough—too much, really—for one day. See you tomorrow!

Comments Moderated Now

I meant to mention that I've had to install comment moderation on the blog now. There was an abusive profane comment posted over Christmas which I didn't catch for a couple of days because I was travelling. I really cannot have such material appear on the blog, so comments will have to pass my sharp moderator's eye now before appearing.
Anyhow, I don't get that many comments on this blog, and I will try to check them regularly. I apologize for the inconvenience to my regular commentors who I enjoy and appreciate very much. It is unfortunate that this is necessary, to say the least.

Faith Gives Us Something

[This follows up on yesterday’s post on faith as substantial reality]. To Luther, who was not particularly fond of the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of “substance”, in the context of his view of faith, meant nothing. For this reason he understood the term hypostasis/substance not in the objective sense (of a reality present within us), but in the subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and so, naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a disposition of the subject.

In the twentieth century this interpretation became prevalent—at least in Germany—in Catholic exegesis too, so that the ecumenical translation into German of the New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as follows: Glaube aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein von dem, was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes, being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek term used (elenchos) does not have the subjective sense of “conviction” but the objective sense of “proof”…

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.

Spe Salvi 7

Reflection – This is really so very beautiful, even if we have to wade through unfamiliar Greek, Latin, and German vocabulary to get to it. Sometimes, it’s worth it.

Faith gives us something. That alone is worth pondering, eh? What does faith give you? Not on the level of subjective feelings, but objective reality. Not the promise of pie in the sky tomorrow and forever, but here and now today—what does faith give you? I think this is one of those questions we should have a ready answer for. Do you?

Because, of course, the world may question this, and may at times deride this idea. To it, faith can be either an irrelevancy, an exercise in juvenile magical thinking, or a heavy moralistic burden. What objective reality—what earthly good—does faith deliver to us?

Faith gives us the living presence of God, a substantial reality that comes to us daily, Who we can touch and embrace and be embraced by. Faith gives us God as food and drink in the Eucharist, and as mercy poured out in Reconciliation, and as the very life of the soul continually through the indwelling of the Spirit.

Faith gives us, then, an orientation of our life towards this God and His kingdom. Faith shapes every action we take, every day of our lives, towards this kingdom. In other words, faith gives us hope, and hope is not some airy-fairy yearning for an imaginary cloud-cuckoo paradise. Hope gets us off our duffs and into the fray of life, to lay our lives down for the sake of this kingdom which is not ours yet, but which the presence of God assures us will be one day.

Faith gives us, then, a way of life that is already an extension of this future kingdom. The kingdom begins now, today, in you and me insofar as we receive the gift faith brings. In other words, faith brings us love, a life lived for others, laying down our lives in service and friendship, in works of mercy and in compassion for the ‘least of our brothers.’

Not one bit of what I am describing here is abstract or subjective feeling or some ethereal hocus-pocus. Because of faith our lives can be transformed, here and now, into an expression of the Gospel, ordered towards the eternal reality of heaven but lived in such a way as to bring the heavenly life down to earth, ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’ as we pray every day.

This is what being a saint is all about, and faith ultimately delivers to us the road to holiness. Insofar as we believe, receive faith’s gifts, and live from those gifts, we become saints, and the light of God shines forth anew in the darkness of the world. There’s nothing else worth doing in this life, you know. So let’s try to live our faith today and let hope and love guide all our choices today.

Intensely Advent

In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews (v. 1) we find a kind of definition of faith which closely links this virtue with hope. Ever since the Reformation there has been a dispute among exegetes over the central word of this phrase, but today a way towards a common interpretation seems to be opening up once more. For the time being I shall leave this central word untranslated. The sentence therefore reads as follows: “Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen”. For the Fathers and for the theologians of the Middle Ages, it was clear that the Greek word hypostasis was to be rendered in Latin with the term substantia. The Latin translation of the text produced at the time of the early Church therefore reads: Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium—faith is the “substance” of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo”—and thus according to the “substance”—there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence.

Spe Salvi 7

Reflection – OK, this may seem all very technical and dry, full of obscure points about language and long quotes in Latin and references to (horrors) Thomas Aquinas. The blog reader may be tempted to come back tomorrow when I am doing something simpler. Despair not – I come to make all things clear, if they are not yet so.

Basically, it means that we all live our lives in Advent, even as we celebrate the season of Christmas, prepare now to celebrate the Epiphany (the feast of the ‘appearing’ of God), and from there launch again into Ordinary Time and before we know it the Lent-Easter cycle.

Nonetheless, our Christian life here and now is intensely an Advent matter. Advent is the shortest of all seasons, yet it is the whole season of our life. That is, we are all pregnant, be we male or female. We all bear within us a life, an embryonic life, a beginning of a life that is very real, as real as can be, but very hidden. The condition of Mary in her nine months of pregnancy is a close analogue to the condition of the Christian through our years of life on this earth.

The ‘thing’ is already present—this thing which is the life of Christ being lived in our own lives. But it has not appeared yet, except in the precise same sense that those who have eyes to see recognize the life of the child in the swelling of the womb of the mother.

It really is the same sort of thing. Those who have eyes to see can recognize the signs of Christ’s life in the life of a disciple as it grows. Charity, mercy, generosity of heart, quickness to forgive, courage in bearing witness, steadfastness in bearing burdens, peace, joy—all of these are sure signs of Christ’s life growing in a human heart. When someone has been ‘very pregnant’ in their lives—showing!—we might call them a saint after they die.

But of course those who do not have eyes to see can deny all of the above, just as those who (alas!) do not wish to acknowledge it can deny the life of the child right until the moment it is born. I don’t mean to blog about abortion in this post, but we can see here an added dimension to the already tragic assault on human life: to refuse to admit a reality until it is seen in full blocks us off from the whole life of faith in its essential nature.

The life of faith, this hidden interior life of God in us, is so very much like pregnancy. We bear within us a life that is not our own, that our own autonomous will did not create of itself, that is a fruit of God’s coming to us and his faithful love for us. This life will appear in the fullness of time in the blessed life of the saints in heaven. But it is already real, already wanting to grow and expand and stretch us, perhaps cause us some discomfort and pain, even, but always in service of this new life blossoming in us.

 

Let us long, then, for the appearing of God in our lives and in our world, and in the world to come when all shall be made manifest, the eternal epiphany of our God in glory and joy.

The Truth of Man

To bow low before a human being to win his favour is indeed unfitting. But to bow low before God can never be unmodern, because it corresponds to the truth of our being. And if modern man has forgotten this truth, then it is all the more incumbent on Christians in the modern world to rediscover it and teach it to our fellow men.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 206

Reflection – Well, it’s good to be back, both in MH Combermere where real winter arrived in my absence (-21 C today!), and at LWAGS to resume a new year of blogging for the glory of God. Happy New Year (belated) to everyone, and let’s pick up where we left off, eh?

It’s nice when my Randomized Ratzinger Quote Generator™ coughs up a quote that is so perfect liturgically and in view of my own recent activities. Here we are approaching Epiphany rapidly, and we have a quote about bowing low before God. I am just coming back from a conference that was intensely missionary in spirit, calling the young attendees to become missionaries to the modern world, and here we have a quote about being just that.

So, CCO RiseUp was quite the experience. I came back from it rather sick and croaking at everyone (‘for someone who’s lost his voice, you certainly are talking a lot’ was a comment made to me by one of my travelling companions. It takes a lot to shut me up.) 30 hours travelling each way by train and car was a bit exhausting, and the days were full of talks, worship, ministry and lots and lots of personal encounters. We all got back tired but happy.

It was fantastic. Anyone out there reading this who has any presence of CCO in your vicinity (this is Catholic Christian Outreach, a Canadian Catholic university mission group, for those in the rest of the world), get involved with them. Help them, financially if you can, since each CCO missionary has to raise his or her own salary. Send searching young people their way. If you are a searching young person, look for them. They have a simple, brilliant, proven-to-work way of introducing the basic Christian proclamation to young people, bringing them to commit their lives to Christ, and then calling them to embrace the missionary call of the Church. They are, truly, awesome.

Anyhow, the whole experience was very much about what Ratzinger writes of so powerfully above. The truth of our being, which never changes from age to age, and which we urgently need to embrace ourselves and communicate to others. Bowing down low before God in worship, and out of that bowing low, receiving his Spirit so as to go out to the ends of the earth to bring his love and mercy to the world, starting with our next door neighbours, preferably.

But it starts with bowing down low. It starts with a communion of love that is not a relationship between equals, but an encounter of our littleness with his greatness, our weakness with his majesty, our nothingness with him who is everything.

This is the profound core truth of humanity, and the one who shows us this truth is Mary, the Mother of God. The modern world wishes to establish a mode of human life without God-we call it secularism; she is our response to the modern world in this fool’s dream it has. As De Lubac put it in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God he can only organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.”

When we lose our core human reality of being open to the Absolute, to that which utterly transcends not only ourselves but all created reality, that opens us up to eternity and infinity, that which is above and before and beyond all that is—when we lose that, we are reduced to nothing more than an animal that can do sums and build stuff.

It is the very act of worship, of bowing down, of humbling ourselves before God, of abasing ourselves before the Mighty One that paradoxically establishes us in our human dignity, the true greatness of the human person, the reality of who we are and what we are made for—communion with the One who is Lord of all and who desires to establish us in royal dignity in his eternal kingdom.

So… come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

The Facts of God

The basic form of Christian faith is not: I believe something, but I believe you... faith is not primarily a colossal edifice of numerous supernatural facts, standing like a curious second order of knowledge alongside the realm of science, but an assent to God who gives us hope and confidence.

Faith and the Future, 20-1

Reflection – Well, here I am in Halifax, after 30 hours of marathon traveling by car, train, cab, train, and car. The highlight of the trip was our train running out of gas in Montreal (I didn’t know they could do that!), and a wild cab ride through the city to (barely) make our connecting train to the East coast. The CCO Rise-Up conference begins this afternoon, so as promised, here I am resuming regular blogging in the meantime.

When Ratzinger writes the above reflection on the nature of faith as opposed to science, we have to be careful that we understand him rightly. There is a whole approach to faith, which in this same book he explicitly rejects, where religion has nothing to do with facts or historical events, but is simply a matter of emotion or ethics or aesthetics. All the dogmas and creedal formulations are mere symbols that help us towards an ethical or beautiful way of life.

No – God has indeed communicated to us certain things about Himself, and these are essential to faith. His triune nature, His action of incarnation ex Maria virgine, and all that Jesus said and did in His life, the whole historical fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection and its effect on humanity, the reality of the ascension and the gift of the Spirit to the Church—all of these are facts, not mere symbolism or myth. The human language we are necessarily required to us to express these facts is, of course, inadequate to the nature of God, but nonetheless, the revelation is real and the facts are facts.

Ratzinger’s point here is that all of these facts are not merely given to us in the sense that scientific data is given to us, as bare statements about the world which we either find useful or not, but which are nonetheless given to us as information about reality.

This is not the dynamism of faith. Faith is all about making a choice about this core relationship with this One who reveals Himself to us. God reveals Himself as Father—my choice is to trust Him and base my life on His love. God reveals Himself as Son—my choice is to recognize in the Son the way to the Father and the pattern of my own life as a son of the Father. God reveals Himself as Spirit—my choice is to cry out ‘Come, Holy Spirit’, to know and live my life out of the surety of God’s action and gift to me of His own self.

And so it goes. Every little bit of the facts, the data God reveals to us is for the sake of eliciting a response of trusting love and joyful obedience in us. Now at this point a voice from the peanut gallery can perhaps be heard. ‘Yeah, right!’ it seems to say.

Because of course it is the feast of the Holy Innocents today, isn’t it. And with that feast, right in the heart of all the joyful facts about baby Jesus and mother Mary and the noble awesome doctrine of the Incarnation—God becoming man, the Word taking flesh—well, suddenly we have a lot of other facts to contend with.

Dead babies. Murdered children. Lots of them. A violent, brutal world in which the weakest and most innocent, the vulnerable and the small are run over and torn apart by the cruelty of wicked men and the selfishness of our modern ‘civilized’ way of life. We look to our Church, where the facts tell us the Spirit has been poured out, and alas! More abused children, a betrayal of trust, and deep sorrow and rage.

These are all facts, too. And so we have the facts of God and the facts of man. That which God has shown us, and that which humanity shows us. And of course world and church are full of goodness and kindness and sympathy—it’s not all wicked cruelty. But there it is, and we all know it.

It seems to me that in the face of what we all know about the world and what happens to people, especially the small and weak in the world, we can choose to despair in God, in the ‘facts of God’ which at any rate do not seem to be strong enough to stop human evil from propagating. Or we can choose to take our stand on these facts of God, the promises of God, the action of God, the love of God in the world. Ally ourselves to it, commit our lives to receiving it, following it, and imitating it, and so become ourselves a ‘fact of God’ in the world. A saint, in other words.

Or we can cry and scream and curse the darkness and curse or deny God. We may need to cry or even scream at times, in the face of terrible evil and suffering. But always we are confronted with the choice to love, to turn to God, to take up the task, the burden, and the glorious mission of love in the world, and so be one with the One who bore that burden in full and has carried the whole world—all the suffering children, all the abused and the abusers who make them suffer—in his Sacred Heart to the heart of the Father, to be healed and raised up with Him in a new world where such things are no more, and every tear will be wiped away.

 

Happy feast day, holy innocents, and all us less-than-innocent ones, too.

Update: It appears that wifi access is going to be very limited this week, and the schedule rather full. I am currently working from a nearby Tim Hortons! So... talk to you all in the New Year, and meanwhile keep CCO Rise-Up in your prayers.