Watch for the Light

A Reflection on Annie Dillard’s Bethlehem (pp. 214-17) Several years ago Pat and I visited the Holy Land for the first time, and one of our must-see stops was Bethlehem. As Annie Dillard notes, today it is not an easy place to get to, as it is in Palestinian territory and remains a contested piece of land. What a perverse irony: for Jesus’ birthplace to be the subject of continuing conflict and violence.  The Church of the Nativity, too, is far from the prettiest church I’ve ever seen, and as Dillard relates, both the architecture and the diversity of visitors reflects competing claims being made on the place by Christians of every conceivable denomination and cultural context. The place is almost always teeming with tourists, which gives it a carnival atmosphere that feels wildly inappropriate to what happened here. But notwithstanding all these human efforts to debase the place, as Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav says: “Every day the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement.

A Reflection on Romano Guardini’s The Holy Mother (pp. 205-13) One of the great strengths of the Roman Catholic faith, as Romano Guardini reminds us, is its reverence for one particular mother, Mary, the God-bearer, the woman who brought Jesus Christ into the world. One reason Christians venerate Mary is because we know deep in our hearts that the relationship between a mother and a child is the closest thing most humans experience to the love that God has for us. Consider for a moment what our mothers have done for us:  they suffered hours of painful labor to bring us into the world, they nursed us, bathed us, changed our diapers, put up with our tantrums, kissed our bruised knees, consoled us through the emotional ups and downs of our adolescence, wiped tears from our eyes when we were hurt. But more than that, mothers are always there, ready with their love when we most need it. You remember, I’m sure, the story of the Runaway Bunny, the classic children’s book by Margaret

A Reflection on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Coming of Jesus in our Midst (pp. 201-04) The text for Bonhoeffer’s Advent reflection is Revelation 3:20:  “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” Rather than offer my own thoughts on Bonhoeffer’s piece, I thought I would share a painting instead, perhaps the most famous rendering of this same text from Revelation: William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World,” which is housed in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.  Here is a short analysis from the Cathedral’s website: “There are two lights shown in the picture. The lantern is the light of conscience and the light around the head of Christ is the light of salvation. The door represents the human soul, which cannot be opened for the outside. There is no handle on the door, and the rusty nails and hinges overgrown with ivy denote that the door has never been opened and that the f

A Reflection on Brennan Manning’s Shipwrecked at the Stable (pp. 184-200) Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mk 2:17). The righteous cannot recognize Christ, because they believe they are just fine on their own and are pretending they are not “shipwrecked,” to us Brennan Manning’s phrase; they are unaware of their predicament and thus blind to the News which addresses it.  But the sinners and outcasts, those who know they are shipwrecked, take to Christ immediately. They are drawn to the stable, and will not leave, because having been lost, they now can see in the eyes of the infant God that they have been found. This Child is whom they have been waiting for! The message of the Incarnation is good news for us, Manning insists, not only because it addresses our plight, but also because it comes wholly from outside of ourselves. It is not something we could have discovered, in

A Reflection on Dorothy Day’s Room for Christ (pp. 176-83) It is almost a throw-away line in Luke’s gospel, one you might miss if you’re not paying attention. In between describing Jesus’ birth to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the joyous reception that greet the infant Jesus by the shepherds in the field and the angels on high, Luke feels compelled to explain why this astonishing birth took place in a meager manger:  “…because there was no place for them in the inn.” Luke 2:7b. This one clause could well be the motto for the life of Dorothy Day. As she explains at the very outset of her Advent reflection: “It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.” But for Dorothy Day, this call to hospitality is not merely spiritual (“in our hearts”) but incarnational (“in the streets”!). She reminds us that anytime

A Reflection on Evelyn Underhill’s The Light of the World (pp. 168-75) As we expectantly await the arrival of Christmas during this season of Advent, our focus naturally is on the events leading from the Annunciation – the angel Gabriel delivering the astonishing news to the unassuming Mary – to the birth of the infant Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem. And these events are indeed breathtaking enough. God becoming human, the transcendent joining with the homely, in the mystery of the Incarnation. But Evelyn Underhill reminds us that Christmas is actually a season, twelve wonderful days extending from the Nativity to the Epiphany, and that there is a spiritual coherence to this stretch of time. As she explains: “The Christmas mystery has two parts: the nativity and the epiphany. A deep instinct made the Church separate these two feasts. In the first we commemorate God’s humble entrance into human life, the emergence and birth of the holy, and in the second its manifestation to the worl