Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 1:29PM 
What a poignant image. Will it still be like this next year, or will we see the beginning of change?
And yet I'm still reminded of a beautiful and ancient quotation from Angelus Silesius:
"If in your heart you make a manger for his birth, then God will once again become a child on this earth."
Saturday, June 9, 2012 at 12:17PM The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, by Belden Lane, is one of the best books I've read in the last 5 years. It is a very moving reflection on the tradition of desert and mountain spirituality in the Christian tradition, interwoven with the author's personal experience of watching his mother die slowly in a nursing home. It has been particularly powerful for me because my own mother is towards the end of a very long and slow decline into incapacity in a care home not far away from where I live.