Sunday-Ps 148 starts off our new year with a song of praise.The psalmist gives voice to nature. What element of nature would you like to provide words of pra9ise as 2017 dawns?
Monday-"All saving ideas are born small. God comes to earth as a child so that we can finally grow up, which means we can stop blaming God for being absent when we ourselves were not present, stop blaming God for the ills of the world as if we had been laboring to cure them, and stop making God responsible for all the thinking and doing we should be undertaking on our own...God provides minimum protection and maximum support--support to help us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God's universe. God doesn't want us narrow-minded, priggish, subservient, but joyful and loving, as free for one another as God's love was freely poured out for us at Christmas in that babe in the manger." (William Sloane Coffin)
Tuesday-When you hold in your minds the promise that when all other help fails then Israel’s God will come in person to rescue and deliver; and when you start with the symbol of the temple in which heaven and earth belong together as a sign of creation and new creation, with a human being, a king or a priest, standing there to complete the picture then it makes sense, glorious sense, world-shattering sense, heaven-and-earth sense to see Jesus of Nazareth as the climax of this story, the fulfilment of this symbol, the living embodiment of this God. NT Wright
Wednesday-The Christian life, as eucharistic life, is one that rests not on calculating the odds but on God’s promise of a new creation—one that we can imaginatively characterize as a huge reunion banquet, a table set for all peoples. It will be a homecoming in which ancient separations and animosities will be left decisively behind. R. Byars
Thursday-"What has to be healed in us is our true nature, made in the likeness of God. What we have to learn is love. The healing and the learning are the same thing, for at the very core of our essence we are constituted in God's likeness by our freedom, and the exercise of that freedom is nothing else but the exercise of disinterested love - the love of God for his own sake, because he is God. The beginning of love is truth, and before he will give us his love, God must cleanse our souls of the lies that are in them." (Merton)
Friday-The gift from God of God’s very self for the sake of you being your very self so that the world might indeed know God’s love -- in, through, and because of you." in a humanity of "fullness and foibles, its power and pain, its joys and sorrows."K. Lewis
Saturday-"Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it. So welcome to your own priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life. The good news is that you have everything you need to begin."
~From An Altar in the World
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