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The kids at our church put on a spectacular Christmas pageant last Sunday. All the main characters from the nativity scene were there, such as the lion, the kangaroo and the dinosaur. Everything went fairly smooth until the lion and dinosaur decided to "borrow" the baby Jesus. Mary was not amused. I think that's why most modern presentations of the Christmas story omit the lion and the dinosaur. I have been assured, however, that they do appear in some ancient Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke. The presence of the kangaroo was a bit of a stretch though.

I'm currently reading The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides. It's a wonderful introduction to Orthodox spirituality and Eastern monastic mysticism. I'm halfway through and have already been challenged to explore my beliefs of icons and idols, signs and wonders, angels and demons, hell, spiritual direction, illnesses of the heart and the influence and source of negative thoughts. I'm hoping to get Gifts of the Desert, Markides' new book, over the holidays. It will probably have to be a gift from me to me. The next book on my reading list is Living Prayer by Anthony Bloom, which I had to track down from a used bookstore in New York.

We're having a dinner party this evening at Rochelle's parents and have invited 13 of our Chinese friends. Dave and Bev have made some of their spectacular chili and each family is bringing a homemade Chinese dish for everyone to sample. Yumm. Kirst is home for the holidays and is planning some games with her friend Crystal, so it should be a blast. We did this last year and had a great evening.

One more day until I get my wife back. She's been coordinating kettles (Christmas fundraising) for our church this year, and has gone a little wacko. But don't tell her I said so… We head out to my parents place tomorrow night after she finishes her final kettle pickups. Yahoo!

If everyone in the world enjoyed Canada's standard of living, it would take four Earths to supply our needs and dispose of our waste. Americans consume even more. Makes you kind of wonder if our part of the world doesn't have some serious vested interest in making sure other parts of the world don't reach our standard of living (because - at the moment - we only have one Earth - so that would means we'd have to consume and dispose a lot less...) Hmmm...

The first chapter of Anthony Bloom's Beginning to Pray deals with the absence of God. Well, not a real absence – God is never really absent – but the sense of absence that many of us will experience at some points in our lives. Here is a snippet from this first chapter:

First of all, it is very important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or God. The fact that God can make Himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship.

If we could mechanically draw Him into an encounter, force Him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet with Him, there would be no relationship and no encounter. We can do that with an image, with the imagination, or with the various idols we can put in front of us instead of God; we can do nothing of the sort with the living God, any more than we can do it with a living person.

A relationship must begin and develop in mutual freedom. If you look at the relationship in terms of mutual relationship, you will see that God could complain about us a great deal more than we about Him. We complain that He does not make Himself present to us for the few minutes we reserve for Him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer 'I am busy, I am sorry' or when we do not answer at all because we do not even hear the knock at the door of our heart, or our minds, of our conscience, of our life. So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God, because we are a great deal more absent than He ever is.

The second very important thing is that a meeting face to face with God is always a moment of judgment for us. We cannot meet God in prayer or in meditation or in contemplation and not be either saved or condemned. I do not mean this is major terms of eternal damnation or eternal salvation already given and received, but it is always a critical moment, a crisis. 'Crisis' comes from the Greek and means 'judgment.' To meet God face to face in prayer is a critical moment in our lives, and thanks be to Him that He does not always present Himself to us when we wish to meet Him, because we might not be able to endure such a meeting. Remember the many passages in Scripture in which we are told how bad it is to find oneself face to face with God, because God is power, God is truth, God is purity.

Therefore, the first thought we ought to have when we do not tangibly perceive the divine presence, is a thought of gratitude. God is merciful; He does not come in an untimely way. He gives us a chance to judge ourselves, to understand, and not to come into His presence at a moment when it would mean condemnation.

In Beginning to Pray, Archbishop Anthony Bloom reflects on his fascinating upbringing that saw him living (and fleeing) throughout Russia, Switzerland, Persia, Kurdistan, India, Spain, France, Austria, Yugoslavia and probably a host of other interesting locales. His father, who was a Russian diplomat prior to the revolution, never returned to his old standards of life, choosing instead to work as an unskilled labourer for as long as his health permitted and then in simple clerical duties. He was a strong man who felt that as a Russian he ought to share responsibility for what had happened in his homeland.

Here are a couple of Bloom's memories of his father:

I remember a certain number of his phrases. In fact there are two things he said which impressed me and have stayed with me all of my life. One is about life. I remember he said to me after a holiday, 'I worried about you' and I said, 'Did you think I'd had an accident?' He said, 'That would have meant nothing, even if you had been killed. I thought you had lost your integrity.' Then on another occasion he said to me, 'Always remember that whether you are alive or dead matters nothing. What matters is what you live for and what you are prepared to die for.' These things were the background of my early education and show the sense of life that I got from him.