Month: December 2009
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Advent[ures] in Incarnation [6] | Born Free and Equal in Dignity
Tomorrow (10th) is ‘International Human Rights Day,’ commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN. Article 1 famously reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Incarnation…
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Advent[ures] in Incarnation [5] | No Room for the Inn
Bethlehem has some great hotels. The Intercontinental is a fantastic old place, fronted with beautiful stones and containing a bar and pool room in a cavernous, lime basement. When I stayed there last year it was living up to its name: people from all continents gathered at meal times, piling plates from the buffet with…
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Advent[ures] in #Incarnation [4] | God Looks From the Distorting Human Perspective
Whenever we engage ‘the other’ we have to overcome our fear of doing so. Engagement that holds no such fear is not engagement with an ‘other’; it is easy to love what is lovely – we are called to overcome our fear and love that which is not. As we consider the grounds of the…
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Advent[ures] in Incarnation [3] | Advent Poem | Caesarean Sections
Caesarean Sections The bitter old man stands at the gates of the earth waiting, watching, guarding the only entrance and exit to this citadel planet. The babies file in and the dead file out and he watches them, grimly keeping count. He watches, he waits he shivers to shake tired cold from old limbs, for…
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Advent[ures] in #Incarnation [2] | ‘The Mysteries of the Humans are Mysteries to the Humans Themselves’
The first window on the calendar opens. The scene begins… As I wrote in the previous post, one of the fascinating things about the Incarnation is that it stands as an actual interruption, a marked moment of time with a before and after. Nothing was the same before, and nothing will be the same again.…