Merry Christmas!!!

O ye beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

-Edward Hamilton Sears, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"

Courageous Love

Gertrude, it is not the perfect, but rather the imperfect who have need of love...it takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love.

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Looking vs Seeing

To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing, and one does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Better to Receive Than Give?

We prefer to think of ourselves as givers - powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that we - with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities - had little to do with God's work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins, and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn't think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.

- William Willimon, "The God We Hardly Knew"

Marmalade

"Perhaps it's a sticky ceremony, Mrs. Bird," said Paddington hopefully. -Michael Bond, Paddington Marches On, 26.