the christian calendar on Womb

Leader: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offenses. People: Wash me through and through from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin. F...

The promised Messiah, whose voice sounds like rushing waters, who holds the key to death and Hades, also grew in secret in Mary’s womb. He kicked and elbowed as all babies do, and came at the appointe...

[When you were baptized,] you died and were born in one and the same moment. This saving water was both tomb and womb. It is a strange thing, quite out of the ordinary. For indeed, at the moment of Ba...

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to reca...

By stating that Jesus is “born of woman”—this Mary (as both St. Matthew and St. Luke attest)—St. Paul insists that Jesus is most emphatically human, the “firstborn of all creation. That this Mary is a...

“God is doing a new thing.” —Isaiah 43 I have heard this scripture passage quoted multiple times in the last three years and it still stirs something within me. Do you feel it too? God is doing ...

“Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”  It’s a simple question. It’s also a question on everyone’s minds in the gospels. But it hits differently when you remember who asks i...

To Lent or Not to Lent As someone who grew up Catholic but who "crossed the Tiber north" in middle school (to Presbyterian land), I've experienced some very different perspectives on wh...

And when she, birth-giver— her ordinary vision arrowed down between her legs, through pain and straw, to her son’s dark, slime-streaked hair, to his very skin, red with the struggle of being born—she ...

Truth, by which the world is held together, has sprung from the earth, in order to be carried in a woman’s arms.

Before we get to Easter, we need to linger: in the vulnerability of the basin and the towel at the remembrance and promise of the table in the struggle and betrayal of the garden in the shadows and sh...

Imagine for a moment becoming a baby again. Imagine giving up language and muscle coordination. Imagine losing the ability to eat solid food and control your bladder. God as a fetus! Or imagine yourse...

Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. – Luke 2:19 Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. – Proverbs 4:23 Welcome Little One Holy One So much...

I first encountered Mary and Eve by Sister Grace Remington at my friend’s house in Atlanta. It was hanging as a decoration in their bathroom, and I was stunned by its message. My friends may have been...

O Come, O Come Emmanuel You who are flesh Vulnerable and Lowly and Small Come, O Come Emmanuel You who are Great Holy and Powerful and Forever Come, O Come Emmanuel The Fullness of God with us Make ...

Every Holy Saturday, the Church waits as it were beside the tomb, meditating on Christ's death while awaiting the announcement of his resurrection. Like John, we can take Mary into our homes and p...

Man's maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; th...

He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.

God takes 40 weeks to create a human life in the incubator of a mother’s body. As the tendons are woven around the joints and the lungs find strength to eventually breathe air, the parents wait with a...

Let all your thoughts be with the Most High, and direct your humble prayers unceasingly to Christ. If you cannot contemplate high and heavenly things, take refuge in the Passion of Christ, and love to...

At start of spring I open a trench in the ground. I put into it the winter’s accumulation of paper, pages I do not want to read. Again, useless words, fragments, errors. And I put into it the contents...

Fragile finger sent to heal us Tender brow prepared for thorn Tiny heart whose blood will save us Unto us is born

One of our troubles, is that we have romanticized and sentimentalized the stable and the manger…We see them through the warm glow of our comfortable homes, our candles and our well-fed bodies....Perha...

Merciful and everliving God, Creator of heaven and earth, the crucified body of your Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy day. Grant that we may await with him the dawning of the third day...

Loving God ~ Father, Son and Holy Spirit: We are a people who are waiting: waiting to celebrate Messiah’s birth; waiting to see what this day – and every day – holds as Your blessings for us; and wait...

It was a time like this,  war and tumult of war,  a horror in the air. Hungry yawned the abyss— and yet there came the star  and the child most wonderfully there. It was a time like this ...

What self denial! What self abasement! What self emptying! He, whom no infinitudes can hold, is contained within infant’s age, and infant’s form. Can it be, that the great ‘I AM THAT I AM’ shrinks int...

When I recite this in church [Jesus’ decent into Hell], I think there is just no place where the encompassing love of God can’t be present. There is no place where God is afraid to go.

In the past week, I (Stu) have experienced some rather wild circumstances. The most significant was waking up last Thursday with incredible stomach pain in the middle of the night. After trying to &qu...

For all the wandering, this is the first question of the Old Testament—God coming to ask after you, “Where are you?” Where are you in your life? Where are you—from Me? To get where you want to go, t...