Entries Tagged 'Holidays' ↓

And here is a George Herbert poem for your Easter meditation entitled Easter.

Note what Herbert does with the grisly image of Christ’s sinews stretched upon the wooden Cross, transposing that Good Friday horror into the joy of Easter morning.

Grunewald’s “Resurrection”

(By the same artist who painted the Crucifixion, above. From the deadest Jesus to the most alive Jesus.)

Here is a holiday–a holy day–we don’t have to rehabilitate, re-claim, or re-interpret, a holy day that the secular world is oblivious to, the day we commemorate Christ giving us His body and His blood in an ongoing sacrament, so as that “as oft as ye do this,” He is with us, giving the Gospel to us, tangibly and experientially, in bread and wine.

I have always thought that we ought to bring out the more mind-blowing dimensions of our faith in our efforts at evangelism, that instead of downplaying them to the people we expect would have the hardest time with them and saving them for later, we should highlight such things to the secular world, especially now, as postmodernists crave mystery, are actually attracted to things they don’t understand, and in many cases yearn for an authentic reality outside themselves that they have been told does not exist.

How could we lift up the sacraments in evangelism?

Today is another holiday that we should reclaim: St. Patrick’s Day.

Instead of just making it about Ireland, let’s make it about St. Patrick and what he did. Let’s take the opportunity to honor him by honoring all missionaries.

St. Patrick was one of many missionaries to what was then the dangerous mission field of Europe. Those of us of European heritage need to remember that our ancestors came to Christianity the same way “Third World” people did, through the dedicated work of missionaries.

Here is a good slogan for the day: “If your ancestors were Christians, thank a missionary.”

How else could we turn St. Patrick’s Day into a festival to celebrate the work of missionaries?

So what are you going to do with the extra day that you have been given this year?

I believe that February 29, which we only get once every four years, should be a holiday. And I’m not just talking about Little Orphan Annie’s birthday (which was how her creator explained how she was still a kid after decades in the funny papers). It should be a day on which we contemplate time as God’s gift, a truly extra, gratuitous day. It would be like a national snow day, in which people don’t have to go to work. (After all, if you have an annual salary, you are not being paid for today. Think about it.) But it shouldn’t be a time of going out for some big vacation, either (and the government should NOT tamper with the calendar by trying to move February 29 to Monday). Just stay at home and do nothing in particular.

Any other ideas for what we could do with this holiday? What we should call it or how we should celebrate it?

There is an old custom of women getting to propose to men during Leap Year. Women could do that or take other initiatives. I could see making it a holiday in honor of women, though we wouldn’t want the feminists to take it over. But how else should February 29, a day that only comes around once every four years, be celebrated?