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Join me and all of us at St Stephen’s Church, Belvedere in continuing the medieval practice of celebrating Christmas through not just the twelve days of Christmas but also the forty days of the Christmas season, all the way to Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification, on February 2. 

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We give you thanks, O Lord of glory, for the example of the first martyr Stephen, who looked up to heaven and prayed for his persecutors to your Son Jesus Christ, who stands at your right hand; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

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O Emmanuel, our king and lawgiver, longing of the nations and Savior thereof: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

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O King of the nations, and desire thereof, and cornerstone that makest of twain one: come and save Man, whom Thou formed from the mire of the earth.

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O Morning Star, splendor of eternal light and sun of righteousness: Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

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O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens: come, and lead forth the captive who sits in the shadows from his prison.

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O Root of Jesse, that stands for an ensign of the people, before whom the kings keep silence and unto whom the Gentiles shall make supplication: come, to deliver us, and tarry not.

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O Adonai, and Ruler of the house of Israel, who appeared unto Moses in the burning bush, and gave him the Law on Sinai, come to redeem us with arm outstretched!

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O Wisdom, that comest from the mouth of the Most High, that reachest from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things, come and teach us the way of prudence.

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#NowPlaying Humbly I Adore Thee by F. Scott Warren, St. Ignatius Loyola Children's Choir, Nancianne Parrella, Michael Sheetz, Mary Huff

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These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

On his year’s mind, G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News. Gilbert Keith Chesterton died 14th June 1936.

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Mob mentality had taken over. "It became barbaric," says Thomas. "When people are in a crowd they are more likely to do things they would never do as an individual. Someone had to step out of the pack and say, 'This isn't right.'" So the teenager, then still at high school, threw herself on top of a man she did not know and shielded him from the blows. "When they dropped him to the ground, it felt like two angels had lifted my body up and laid me down." For Mark Brunner, a student photographer who witnessed the episode, it was who she saved that made Thomas' actions so remarkable. "She put herself at physical risk to protect someone who, in my opinion, would not have done the same for her," he says. "Who does that in this world?"

BBC News Magazine 

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Reflections on Moving

The self is always on the way and is not available to us abstracted from the story of one’s life — which story is not yet complete. Only God, as St. Augustine said, can catch the heart and hold it still. Only God can see us whole and entire, as we truly are. Hence, we cannot in any complete sense account for ourselves or our decisions, even as I noted that I am often baffled when I try to account for my decision to move. To take the embedded nature of our life seriously is to realize that the story of that life must be precisely what St. Augustine wrote — a confession that God knows us better than we know ourselves. We are characters in a story of which we are not the author, caught up in a present moment that is always, in Stephen Crites’ felicitous phrase, a “tensed present.” Caught between memory of the past and expectation of the future, embedded in a present moment, unable to say in any complete sense who we are, we exist within the tensions of this pilgrim existence. By disturbing the ground of our life, moving seems to rake up all those tensions. It discloses human life as it has been created by God. It is a finite and bodily life, tied to particular times and places. To give ourselves to no one and no place in particular is not to be more like God; it is just to fail as a human being. We are in large measure the conversations we have had, the games we have played, the books we have read, the work we have done. But we are not only that, for we are also on the way. As spirits made to rest in God, made to live in expectation, we transcend every particular location, and we must learn to live within that tension. — Gilbert Meileander, *Creatures of Place and Time: Reflections on Moving*

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We ride with our backs to the engine. We have no notion what stage in the journey we have reached ... but a story is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be understood till you have heard the whole of it.

C. S. Lewis