This season’s festive cards that crush and crowd the mails bear witness to the limits, all those insistent boundaries that ever mark and mar our loving. Time diminishes daily, the distant miles remain the same. Lives we have brushed against and learned to care for now seem too far removed to reach again, remember and renew the days we shared. But still we cherish them, refuse, despite the years, to let them go, and want to let them know that within the promise of the manger child our hope is yet alive, a hope writ large across this flimsy, brightly colored card. – J. Barrie Shepherd … [Read more...]

It’s about the giving, really. So that all those holy folk who moan about the marketing and such can tend to miss the deep, abiding truth that, for a month, at least, and once in every year, all sorts of people seek to find new, and surprising ways to make other people smile, ways to say, in varying degrees of warmth, “I love you,” or at least, “I care,” ways to call a temporary halt to grab-and-gain, and set aside a time and place for simple gratitude instead. Given the way we spend the remainder of our days and months, one might be excused for calling this an honest-to-God miracle.   … [Read more...]