The Little Friar

It's tough enough living day to day, making all the necessary changes I have to make with my life, to worry about adding some over-arching change to which I will aspire for the New Year.  I'm enough of a mean-spirited, selfish, depressed, solipsist, that one resolution cannot make all the changes that need to be made. So I don't do it. Most people make so short-sighted and self-involved New Year resolutions that, typically, they'll have forgotten what they decided to change by the end of January, or at least most certainly by June. That said, I believe the making of resolutions -- since I do make them (just daily, not annually).  Resolutions offer us a time to give an account, if only to ourselves, about who we take ourselves to be and what we aspire to become.  That kind of honest introspection is anything but self-involved and narcissistic. With everyone one of us, there's a wide gulf between what we are meant to be and what we allow ourselves ...

Preaching during Christmas is always a difficult thing to do.  Partly because the story is so often heard that it's so little known.  Jesus' birth -- at least as recounted in the gospels -- is a highly-charged and political affair.  I've known for a long time that preachers don't have the luxury of dismissing in the pulpit a serious question that arises from the pews, so I knew I'd have to say a word about the current American political climate, too.  Listening to Jesus -- as the teachers in the Temple in Luke 2 did -- is a complicated and complicating thing.  It often means you'll have to filter through all the other voices that demand attention -- even if those voices, like Mary, attempt to put Jesus in the place we're rather certain Jesus is meant to occupy.  After all, Mary attempting to scold Jesus -- "Look, son, why are you treating us like this?  Don't you know that your dad and I have been looking for you ... for three days ?!?" -- w...

Ace Collins' Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas offers some little-known holiday history in this interesting book that teems with Christmas facts and legends, arranged alphabetically by topic. Readers will be fascinated to learn, for example, that the holiday shopping season used to be only a couple of weeks long, but was extended during WWII so families could get care packages off to soldiers in a timely fashion. Or that St. Francis of Assisi was one of the first people to use a live nativity scene to teach others about Christ's birth. Collins tackles customs such as Christmas gifts and cards, and the popularity of cultural events like the Nutcracker and the Messiah (which, intriguingly, fell entirely out of fashion in the decades after Handel's death). There are chapters on the history of holly, mistletoe, Christmas trees, candy canes, poinsettias, yule logs, stockings and -- of course -- Santa Claus. It's ideal reading for thos...

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, upon them the light has dawned. You have increased their joy and given them great gladness; they rejoiced before you as with joy at the harvest. For you have shattered the yoke that burdened them; the collar that lay heavy on their shoulders. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given , and the government will be upon his shoulders. And his name will be called: Wonderful Counselor; the Mighty God; the Everlasting Father; the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, Upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and uphold it with justice and righteousness. From this time forth and for evermore; the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. -- Isaiah 9.2,3b,4a,6,7  All the blessings of a holy, bright, and happy Christmas from the McCarters!

It is now that season when I see all sorts of posts on Facebook that call for Christians:  "Keep Christ in CHRISTmas". And I simply shake my head. I don't expect American culture to keep Christ in anything, much less Christmas. That's the Church's responsibility.  (Those two -- American culture and Church -- aren't interchangeable terms.) Besides, the "Christ" of American culture is so utterly unlike the Christ of the Church's Scripture, that it's probably best to leave that cultural Christ out of anything. What really does disturb me is that the Christian sisters and brothers worried about keeping Christ in Christmas have little problem with this Christ being left out of other national holidays.  I'm looking at you, Memorial Day and Independence Day.  Days, I should add, when he's said things about why those days might be bad -- "Love your enemies" and "pray for those who abuse and kill you". The rea...

When I was a kid, I loved television cartoons (heck, I still do as an adult).  In a world without cable, Youtube, Netflix or dvr, though, if you missed most cartoons, they were gone.  Christmas cartoons were among my favorite -- particularly the cartoons like Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer , A Charlie Brown Christmas , Santa Claus is Coming to Town , and How the Grinch Stole Christmas , to name a few.  Thing is, if you missed those, you had to wait a whole year.  So I'd plan accordingly.  They were that important. I was so addicted to these shows that, looking back, I can now discern that everything I know about Christmas I learned from TV.   Specifically, I learned from TV three big lessons about Christmas. First lesson:  There's something special about Christmas. The first lesson I learnt was from How the Grinch Stole Christmas .  The lesson was this:   There's something special about Christmas.  Something that transc...

In nearly every era of its history, certain Christian individuals and institutions have compelled an "orthodoxy" from others they refused to require of themselves.  And have perceived that "orthodoxy" to involve primarily the intellectual assent to certain tenets of the Christian faith, without expanding that "orthodoxy" to include our ethical lives, too. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that "cheap grace". Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace ...  Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system.  It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God.  An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to remission of sins.  The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, ipso facto, a part in that grace.  In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contriti...

In memory of my great-grandmother Sarah ... who would sing this every year during family get-togethers for this season.  This was her favorite version:

Gus Vickery's Authentic Health:  The Definitive Guide offers practical steps for achieving genuine health along with building the mindset to make it happen -- with particular details about nutrition, meditation, movement and sleep. Vickery insists that health lies in our habits -- so the key for healthy living is in our own mindfulness about how we make daily decisions.  Contrary to the trend in healthy lifestyle maintenance, Vickery insists that what we most need, then, is patience and self-care, not blame.  While there is no blame, it is also imperative that we understand there are no "quick fix" solutions for a healthy life, either.  Where most of us think we're simply too busy to exercise or make healthy food choices, Vickery is quick to counter with the research:  It takes just a few minutes of movement or meditation, or making a healthy salad for lunch, that will yield hours in improved health and higher energy.  The book suggests some behavio...

Joshua Steven Grisetti's God In My Head:  The True Story of an Ex-Christian Who Accidentally Met God details one man's hallucination at the dentist office and how that hallucination brought him face-to-face with God. "I just met God", Grisetti said to the dental hygienist as he woke up from a combination of laughing gas, vodka, Xanax, and marijuana.  He'd combined the drugs to avoid the traumatic pain of getting fillings, but instead, he says, he found himself in a 200-year-long conversation with the creator of the universe.  It was more than nitrous oxide-induced babbling or simple hallucination:  Grisetti was so deeply affected by what he experienced that he writes the ordeal out in surprising detail for this memoir.  The God that Grisetti met was far different from the one he knew as a Southern Baptist child.  This God was hipper, genderless, and more amenable to the New Yorker author's agnosticism, and patiently explained what religions have...

Ruth Schenk's The Better Mom Devotional is a beautiful and edifying devotional for the women in our lives who spend their time and love mothering -- with topics that range from children to husbands to friendship to the Lord and how these mothers can draw closer to him through motherhood. Each day begins with a verse and continues with a focused devotional that can be read in just a few minutes, given that so many women find their time already packed.  These devotions conclude with a prayer and reflection questions that help readers bring the devotion into real life. It makes a perfect Christmas gift! _____________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

On the 16th of December each year, I pause to give thanks for the life of Sarah Cole. My own relationship with my biological mother was rocky, at best.  It was a complex yarn that will probably, this side of the Kingdom, never get unraveled.  My mother has been dead for over 8 years now.  So that's not a yarn I'm prepared to pry apart in the least.  That will always best we left to God. Instead, the woman I most remember as mothering is a woman who was well beyond her childbearing years when she took me in.  And she died when I was just so young.  Sarah was my maternal great-grandmother.  And she took a complex and complicated Autistic boy, with so many social faults and flaws, and helped to fashion a young man in the ways my own biological mother wasn't prepared to do. That taught me a lesson about life and about those who care for us. Women have come and gone through the centuries.   Some mothers, grandmothers; others aunts, cousin...

Dear Dude: Your wife thinks you're a bad husband.  And she's right. You can be a good guy and a bad electrician.  You can be a good guy and a bad dancer. You can be a good guy and a bad husband. This revelation came to me this week as I sat in my hospital bed, alone in my room, waiting on yet another test result over my second cardiac episode on two weeks. The test came and went.  The results are in.  There's a diagnosis and a game plan.  So now it's time to address the other problem that came to me that day. I've been a bad husband.  Now, before too many people balk at that idea, hear me out.  I know I'm a nice guy.  I don't cheat on my wife.  Lots of us do, but I don't, therefore I'm a nice guy.  I don't hit my wife, but lots of others do.  Therefore, surely, I'm a nice guy.  I don't do drugs and I gave up smoking and drinking a long, long time ago.  Lots of other husbands can't say that.  So surely ...

George Herbert Walker Bush died on 30 November, 2018. On 2 December, I was hospitalized with my very first scare involving a cardiac event of some variety.  Doctors still aren't entirely sure what happened.  But what we do know is that I had an event that night that brought me face to face, yet again, with the spectre of death.  Only this time, it was in such a way that remains -- even days later -- not entirely explained.  The lack of explanation frightens me.  Will it happen again?  Will the second episode be considerably worse than the first?   Readers here will know that I have been critical of every American presidential administration of my lifetime.  That criticism hasn't changed.  Policies and procedures of every President cross moral boundaries -- many into things that, for any other nation, would result in war crimes internationally.  And domestically, those policies find ways to dehumanize and disenfranchise scores o...

One of the texts I don't hear being bantered about in the refugee/immigration debate: Hebrews 2.14-15. This is a significant text for my own theological thinking, particularly about this issue. Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death -- that is, the devil -- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. In the affluent West, where our culture is characterized by a "denial of death" -- a culture where we like to pretend, due to modern medicine and our technological wizardry that we are immune to death -- our slavery to the fear of death is mostly neurotic. We strive, in the words of Henri Nouwen, to be relevant, spectacular or powerful in our quest to live a meaningful and significant life in the face of death. If you looked in the mirror today to check your appearance or checked your Facebook, Twitter or blog accounts ...

Shannan Martin's The Ministry of Ordinary Places:  offers us help in learning to look and listen for God in our ordinary, everyday lives.  Compelling, funny, and down-to-earth, Martin offers some of the best spiritual wisdom from her own life (both the triumphs and the flops!) to give readers a reason to find beauty and love in the world around them -- and to see God in those moments and people. About hospitality, community, joy, friendship, and so much more -- The Ministry of Ordinary Places is such timely and necessary reading for Christians who have become embittered in a culture war rather than being ambassadors for Peacemaker.  This is a must-read! ____________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Matthew Fox's Naming the Unnameable:  89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God ... Including the Unnameable God has been a sheer delight!  At a time and in a culture in which competing theologies are only too quick to name the Divine in opposition to the expansive experience of the Holy, Fox is able to offer -- in the rich spiritual tradition of both apophatic and cataphatic theology -- so many of the ways in which the Divine has been known (and even unknown) in our prayers and experiences of the Divine over thousands of years. This collection of brief essays (most are usually just a couple of pages), Fox brings forward 89 "names for God" from various spiritual teachers over millennia and across traditions.  " How we conceive of God", he writes, "will have enormous impact on how we behave toward each other, how we justify our actions, what we believe is possible, and what we find sacred and are therefore willing to sacrifice to protect ...  We need a ...

We've come on a journey -- after 99 book recommendations -- to my very last recommendation:  Hauerwas & Vanier's Living Gently in a Violent World:  The Prophetic Witness of Weakness . The book is very short. It has only four chapters, book ended by an introduction and conclusion authored by John Swinton. (The expanded 2018 edition also includes a study guide, with chapter by chapter questions for review.) Two of the chapters were authored by Vanier and two by Hauerwas. Vanier's chapters deal with practical and personal accounts of life within L'Arche. These accounts, though theologically muddled, demonstrate Vanier's real and significant concern for the citizens of our world least likely to be valued. The vision he provides of people with cognitive disabilities being treated as humans, with personalities and flaws like the rest of us, is compelling. Instead of hiding the mentally disabled from view and treating them like patients, L'Arche communities inv...

It's hard for me to believe that the brouhaha over Roy Moore's display of the 10 commandments in his courtroom is now 15 years ago.  But the American culture wars are still nothing if not fought over the importance of the 10 commandments in American society.  Some feel these 10 "rules", abstracted from the rest of the Christian narrative, can serve as an adequate guide to all things moral. Hauerwas and Willimon's account of the 10 commandments in The Truth about God challenge that belief.  The 10 commandments have a lot to say about the people who observe them, they claim.  But they also have even more to say about the God who claims those people.  They are not some set of universal rules -- they simply offer ways for a certain people to know a certain God -- our God who delivers from the bondage of political and economic bondage.  Whose deliverance then makes claims on how we structure our political and economic and social lives.  God cares how w...