It's a miracle

From Jen at Et Tu whose Christmas Eve sounds familiar:

I lifted my head to look around, and my eyes rested on the consecrated Host that the priest held above the altar. "Of course," I thought. "There He is." I had been in the presence of a miracle, and all I could do was think about how much stuff I had to pack to go out of town.

In his quietness is strength

I love St. Joseph. Unsung but not insignificant, he served and contemplated the divine Son and his holy Mother until the end of his life. He is particularly dear to my husband and me. We've taken him as a patron of our marriage since we each "knew" him throughout our respective Christian walks: I was converted on the feast of St. Joseph, while Henry was baptized during his college years on the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, taking Joseph as his confirmation name.

None of us knows many facts about St. Joseph, and none of his words are quoted in the gospels. His 'hiddenness' is part of the power of his influence. Pope Benedict XVI writes of him:

. . . steeped in contemplation of the mystery of God in an attitude of total availability to the divine desires, [not expressing] an inner emptiness but, on the contrary, the fullness of the faith he hears in his heart and which guides his every thought and action . . . a silence woven of constant prayer, a prayer of blessing of the Lord, of the adoration of his holy will and of unreserved trust in his providence.

As part of our night prayers, Henry and I pray the following Prayer to St. Joseph for Fathers written by Blessed Pope John XXIII. May it delight and encourage you as it does us.

Saint Joseph, chosen by God to be on this earth the guardian of Jesus and chaste husband of Mary, who passed your life in the perfect fulfillment of duty, supporting by the work of your hands the Holy Family of Nazareth, kindly protect us who trustingly turn to you. You know our aspirations, our hardships, and our hopes; we turn to you because we know that we will find in you one who will protect us. You too knew trial, labor, and weariness, but even amid the cares of material life, your soul, filled with the most profound peace, rejoiced in intimacy with the Son of God entrusted to you and with Mary, His most sweet Mother.

Help us to understand that we are not alone in our work, to know how to see Jesus close to us, and to welcome Him with grace and guard Him faithfully as you have done. Pray for us that in our family everything will be sanctified in love, in patience, in justice, and in seeking to do good; that abundant gifts of God's grace may descend upon us. Amen.

United in holy astonishment

- 15th century Russian icon

No matter our theological differences, Protestant or Catholic, we join in this holy season in saying out loud, slowly, with awe, "God with us. God actually born to us, a baby, fully human by simple observation and fully divine by the promises of our Father known by the prophecies of the centuries. He sent His very self to be laid in our hands, to be loved by His mother, taught by her husband, killed by all of us in our sins, to be raised by the power of God to triumph over those sins and open the gates of Heaven." We can't glory in the tenderness of the beginning without seeing the agony and power of the end. We can't see the love of the end without seeing the love of the beginning.

Merry Christmas! May God richly bless all my brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ!

Guy Mary or Guy Martha?

In the post below, the comments rock-skipped from Martha Stewart to Mary and Martha, the dear friends of Jesus, sisters to Lazarus.

Luke summarizes the story:

Now it came to pass, as they went, that [Jesus] entered into a certain village: and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

Women can identify with Martha, I know I can. I can hear her voice, with a bit of an exasperated whine in it, in my own mouth or head, when I feel under-congratulated and under-thanked. In my worldly life, I can easily feel put-upon, the heroine, the ever-faithful daughter, sister, aunt, neighbor, manager, friend. In work and in volunteer church life, since essentially the same roles exist, I can occasionally feel pretty much the same way. Even in my spiritual life, I can even feel unrewarded: "Lord, I put all this face time in, all this spiritual reading and study, and I pray every night and every morning, even when I have a headache blah blah blah....what blessings am I getting?"

In classic meditation practice, picturing all the players in your mind, can't you picture Martha, like that lady in that commercial, flicking a little flour in her face, to appear at the living room door looking even more careworn and exhausted with serving?

Correctly understanding Mary as contemplative, and not just passive and relaxed, at the very least, I can yearn for a more Mary-like role. In either case, I think women can project themselves into the Scripture story, sitting quietly and listening, deeply concentrating on the loved one, or flippin' them hotcakes and shakin' out them rugs and nobody even says that the dinner was good, just shoved it in and left.....

Can men project themselves into the story without too much psychological straining? Do they inevitably see themselves in a too-human Jesus, repressing a roll of His eyes when Martha appears at the door with a frustrated dishtowel in hand?

(For extra credit: can women project themselves as easily as men into the story of the Prodigal Son?)

A thought on entertaining at Christmas

From a nice, pagan Greek:

At feasts, remember that you are entertaining two guests,
body and soul. What you give to the body, you presently lose;
what you give to the soul, you keep for ever.

That's Epictetus.

So when I clean the house so that it looks like I always live like that (hah!), and pick out a menu that suggests I always eat like that (double hah!), I have to remind myself that what's important is how they feel when they get here, how welcome, how comfortable. How the conversation goes, who is honored when they talk, who is given a chance to shine, who is urged into presenting their life and opinion so that it is as important as all others'. I want to be sensitive first of all that all can be entertaining and enjoyed, whether their talk is witty and quick, or mild and quiet. If their life has been sad this year, then all should be of a frame of mind to weep with those who weep, and if their life has provided accomplishments, to rejoice with them too.

This probably has more significance to me than to you, but I have some wildly disparate sets of friends, and if I can make them comfortable with one another by my hospitality, then all will be well. This will take some patience and shutting up on my part, although I admit it's easier to spot-clean the carpet, put a little curry in the sauce and choose the fashionable wine.