Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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Will Smith and the Ten Virgins
In the weeks just before Advent, as the church year draws to a close, we hear stories of the ending of the age and warnings for the unprepared. One that always rattles my soul is Jesus’ parable of the Ten Virgins (unmarried women). They are bridesmaids or torchbearers who are to light the procession into…
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Finding God in the Dark
“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” The questioner who is so confused he doesn’t know if Jesus is the messiah, the man who’s being eaten alive by doubt and misgiving is none other than John the Baptist. What turned the fiery shouter into a doubter? He’s…
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Learning to Hope
“A shoot,” says Isaiah, “shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” That oracle was delivered to a people in exile who had lost everything. Yet Isaiah is not afraid to trust, to envision a future possibility that no one else can see. In January, 1987…
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Advent Credo
Saturdays are poem days in this Advent series. Advent Credo by Daniel Berrigan It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss— This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have…
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What Time Is It?
In the Sunday school chapel at Saint Luke’s Parish, my former congregation, there was a Calendar of the Church Year, a giant clock with colored segments marking the different seasons and a hand that swept around that clock, ticking off the 52 Sundays of the year. Twelve o’clock is blue Advent, then a tiny white…
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Luring the Squirrel
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” When I was in graduate school many years ago, I spent whole days at my desk. One day a squirrel skittered across the porch roof, peered in my window, then rushed away. I was fascinated by…
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How Not To Be a Zombie
The first candle of Advent is lit. Something is about to happen, something essential to life. Yet most of us will fall asleep and miss the shining moment. So Jesus says, “Keep awake.” You don’t know what time this will happen. No one can tell you the day and the hour. No matter how smart you…
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Hope is Not Optimism
This is Advent, the season of hope, but hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism needs some bit of good news to go on, to extrapolate from. Hope burns even in moments when nothing in the circumstances would suggest any reason for optimism. Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, once spoke of Adam…
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Something Greater
ADVENT: DAY TWO The great cry of Advent is maranatha, an Aramaic exclamation dear to early Christians. It means, “O Lord, come!” The first believers had seen the death of Jesus and received the promise of his coming again. They lived with an imminent sense of Christ’s return, yet they did not see it, nor did…