Countdown to Christmas started

It is the time of the year when we prepare to celebrate Christmas. The countdown has started. It is such an exciting time for most of us: the lights, the carols, the atmosphere... How lovely!

Sometimes the joy and excitement are accompanied by other less pleasant feelings - we live in an unperfect world after all. If you experience a feeling of anxiety building up when thinking of the duties that are awaiting you as the Christmas day approaches, well you are not alone. Decorations to make, gifts to prepare, visits to pay, cards to send... We are just humans and have our triggers.

This year my resolution for Advent is to look into the Bible to find wisdom, comfort, reassurance and to replace the unpleasant feelings with a renewed trust in God's love for us all.

My personal intention for today: repay everything with a blessing.

Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing. (1 Peter 3:8-9)

Advent musing... 'Something's coming'... something good?

Alzheimer's, for instance?

In the UK's Daily Telegraph (paywall) the celebrated Catholic pianist/composer Stephen Hough writes movingly about a condition which causes so much fear among so many. Me, for instance. All too often these days I find myself wondering, "Um, what did I want in here? Maybe it'll come back to me if I go out and come in again...' Just daft, maybe (so no change there?) but... God knows what's coming to me as I advance into decrepitude..

Here's a taste of Hough's piece:

Fr O'Leary recently wrote a beautiful, provocative, moving mediation on Alzheimer's disease called 'Silent grace of forgetting'. All of us face the possibility of dementia in varying degrees, either in our own future lives or in the lives of those we love. Its threat is to suck out the personality of the person, leaving behind an empty husk or, worse, a familiar body filled with unfamiliar malevolence – a strange enemy where a dear friend had stood. It's disturbing when it's not damned terrifying. 

In his article Fr O'Leary dares to explore a possible spirituality behind this dreadful disease in the need for "care-filled reverence, [for us to be] the memory for the person, to hold the fragments of a life together".

He points out that "it is not our minds alone which make us human", and he quotes Thomas Merton who wrote of "the secret beauty of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-awareness can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes".

If you want to read it all, there is a PDF here. Left click to view it, right click to save it.

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