Day 66 | Week 20: The True Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.

- Howard Thurman

Day 63 | Week 18: Nuestra Senora De Guadalupe y Hermano La Salle

Day 62 | Week 18: Mercy Before Judgment

“This extraordinary Holy Year itself is a gift of grace.  To enter through the holy door means to rediscover the deepness of the mercy of the Father who welcomes all and goes out to meet everyone personally.  We have to put mercy before judgment, and in every case God’s judgment will always be in the light of his mercy.”

- Pope Francis on the Opening of the Holy Year of Mercy

Day 59 | Week 17: Hope Is The Thing

"How deep the autumn nights and how deep the secret we carry!  Even as the time winds down on the year and our lives, a youthful part of us still plans, dreams, and creates visions of the future.  Something of summer lingers among the bare branches and fallen leaves of autumn.  We carry a day from summer with us across all seasons.  As Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without words and never stops at all.’"

- Marv and Nancy Hiles from An Almanac For The Soul 

Day 58 | Week 17: A Deep Search For Light In The Darkness

Advent invites us to search, with heart and soul,
for the light of hope and the promise of peace
in a darkening world.

How do you nourish hope, in yourself, your family, your community,
and those places where it is most sorely needed?

To hope is to uncover
what is least expected,
sometimes hiding in plain sight.
In a cosmos mostly dark and cold
what could be more unexpected than life,
in all its marvelous manifestations.

Where there is hope, there is life,
precious holy gift, mysterious, magical
and stubbornly enduring.

In righteousness you shall be established;
you shall be far from oppression, for you shall not fear;
and from terror, for it shall not come near you.
– Isaiah 54:14
 

excerpted from Still In the Storm by Joe Grant

Day 57 | Week 17: Gandhi on Peace

"Although we sing, ‘All glory to God on High and on the earth be peace,’ there seems today to be neither glory to God nor peace on earth.  As long as it remains a hunger still unsatisfied, as long as Christ is not yet born, we have to look forward to him.  When real peace is established, we will not need demonstrations, but it will be echoed in our life, not only in individual life, but in corporate life,  Then we shall say Christ is born… Then we will not think of a particular day in the year as that of the birth of the Christ, but as the ever-recurring event which can be enacted in every life."

- Mahatma Gandhi – from a talk given on Christmas Day 1931

Day 56 | Week 17: A Time To Slow Down

“The more you sense and value the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest if, is all your responsibility.  We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for awhile.”

- Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi