Daily Reading for January 1 • The Feast of the Holy Name

Back in the 1950s you opened up the newspaper on the first January certain to find the cartoonists trotting out the images of the little baby in diapers imprinted with the new year’s numbers, and old Father Time with his hourglass and scythe. These secular symbols are already so threadbare that in comparison the scriptural image of today’s liturgy, the Feast of the Holy Name, seems quite dramatic and still replete with meaning. Here the child held up before us is a real infant, and the figure with the sharp blade a real elder who cuts the flesh of the boy as the sign of the covenant with Abraham, while his parents give him his name. We are present at a fateful event: the newborn is becoming a person. And we are also persons, are becoming persons. This feast has to do with us. This becoming a person is what we would know the meaning of.

Seven full days have passed since the birth of Jesus. A week of namelessness, a symbolic hiatus. The infant is only a newborn. Only on the eighth day does the trajectory of the child’s human identity begin; he is acknowledged as a member of the community. He is inserted into its history, claimed by its tradition, and given a destiny within its future by naming. This name that bears his future is one that gathers up into a single sound the whole past experience and hope of his forebears and parents. Yahweh Saves. It is the name of the leader who took the desert wanderers into the promised land.

The feast is no longer called by its old name, the Feast of the Circumcision. Perhaps we are appalled to think about the radical givenness of identity that the irrevocable surgery on a helpless infant expresses so sharply—literally as a matter of flesh and blood. Before there is an I to choose, others choose and must mold and make me and do what calls me into life as a person in a particular community. Each of us is marked for life by the scandal of initial absolute dependence and vulnerability to the cutting edge of our situation. The persons we become can never dissolve or undo this givenness, though some of the wounds may heal and some of the blessings be lost.

From “Seek My Face” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Daily Reading for January 2

No one can say that the classic pattern of the liturgy of Christmas is light on the tragic side of human existence. It has its themes of the census, the exclusion from the inn, the martyrdom of Stephen, the massacre of the innocents, the flight into Egypt, and now this serious evocation of the wound of historical existence, of submission to the narrow way of becoming a unique person through utter dependence on others. But there is throughout the Christmas season an ambience of hope, a yes radiating from the face of Mary that prevails over the shadow. Mother and child smile in mutual recognition, in reciprocal joy. Many of us are captivated and allured by the mystery of Jesus’ emerging self, summoned out of latency by his mother’s gaze and care.

As we contemplate in liturgy, icon, and prayer the face of Mary, we know we are in a mystery. This face launched the movement of the Savior into both personhood and faith. This is the face in which Jesus felt the presence of a loving other, a presence and a sign of wholeness which orders the universe as safe enough for life.

We could do worse than begin the new year by paying loving attention to this crucible of personality, the face-to-face interaction of mother and child, Mary and Jesus, and the arms and face of Mary as primal originating sacrament of the faith and trust of Jesus.

From “Seek My Face” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Daily Reading for January 3

Loving God,
whose angels proclaimed
the saving name of Mary’s child,
grant that we might live each day
in the light of your incarnate love
and guided by your Holy Spirit
find our salvation in and through
the redeeming and most precious name
of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

A prayer for the Feast of the Holy Name by Frank Topping (2001), in Daily Prayer, edited by Frank Topping and based on the classic collection compiled by Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs (Oxford, 2003).

Daily Reading for January 5

E. M. Forster said that the most deep and terrible line written on the nativity is the last line of Yeats’s poem, “The Magi”:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. The magi mysteriously shimmer as faces in the sky, forever peering back behind Calvary to their encounter with the baby lying on the stable floor among oxen and asses, a revelation so mysterious that its depths still baffle them, ever preventing them from being satisfied.

The key to their dissatisfaction is the terrible word “uncontrollable.” Magi were spiritual technicians. Their role was to assist people in getting control of their destinies through divinizing, augury, and horoscope. They offered means of controlling divine presences and forces through spells, charms, and rites. Human religiosity is about control. If the divine is close at hand, right here, then we can manipulate it. It is within our grasp, susceptible to our control. If, on the other hand, the divine is far away in a remote heaven, then we are on our own, and our religious practices serve just as well to calm our fears and put a spiritual gloss on our attempts to keep order.

What met the magi at Bethlehem was the mystery of divine creativity itself, which cannot be usurped or deflected; the uncontrollable mystery of God’s sheer initiative, which cannot be bent or blocked. What met them was the mystery of suffering love, which cannot be bought or seduced, there, right there, lying on its back on the bestial floor. Here is the uncontrollable mystery of Love present in all its fullness as a vulnerable baby.

All at once their potions, their horoscopes, their charts and crystals, their incantations and secret lore collapse into nothing. So they unload onto the floor where the baby lies gazing at them their obsolete bag of tricks—the talismans of gold, the incense with which they fogged and scented their rituals, the myrrh they used for magic ointments. They let all these go in the presence of the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

From “The Uncontrollable Mystery” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Daily Reading for January 6 • The Feast of the Epiphany

A colleague of mine noticed several years ago one of those marvelous phrases of multiple meaning strewn throughout our scriptures, the familiar reference to the magi who, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, . . . left for their own country by another road.” We both had noticed that the political acumen of the magi surely certified their wisdom. But it was my friend who noticed something else: that nearly everyone who encounters Jesus ends up going home by another way. The encounter with Jesus changes people, makes them different. After they have met this Jesus, they seem incapable—or certainly unwilling—to go back the same way they had come.

The Feast of the Epiphany and the season that follows is, for the church, a traditional season of mission and evangelism. Of course, for the modern church in America, there are very few mission fields left to us, few places where the basic outlines of the gospel has not penetrated geographical, political, and cultural barriers in one fashion or another. And evangelism demands some good news to proclaim, but too many days there seems precious little good to report. But there is still a ripe mission field remaining for each of us, if only we turn our sights inward.

I was reminded of this at a national conference for Episcopal students where we used varied liturgies from prayers books across the Anglican Communion. I was reminded of how very different we all are, and how much more so we grow daily. In this modern-day church, as in that ancient stable, those gathered really have nothing much in common. If we look around that manger, if we look at those who surrounded Jesus throughout his life, and even those who stood around at his death, we find that they were as diverse a lot as one might find. Like us. For truth be told, when you get right down to it, we probably really do not have much in common, you and I; the only thing we have in common is this person, Jesus. And that was certainly true for those of us who gathered at that conference. Even when we could not agree on what this Jesus looked like, or what he thought, or the meaning of what he said and did, we could still acknowledge that he was our common connection.

That was his singular gift, a genuine gift, something inherent in his person, and not some skill he crafted or stratagem he employed. For on the first Epiphany he was but an infant. Yet the force of his person was such that the different gathered around him.

From Daysprings: Meditations for the Weekdays of Advent, Lent, and Easter by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Daily Reading for January 7

The story of the magi ranks right up there with the Christmas and Easter stories in terms of snaring the human imagination. Poets as distinct as William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams have wrapped words around the visit of the wise men. Longfellow even gave them names: Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. Hundreds of artists have painted the scene, including Botticelli and Fra Angelico.

In more recent years, Garrison Keillor has told the story on National Public Radio’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and James Taylor has written a lilting song from which the title of this sermon comes. So much has been made of this story about which we know so little. They were not kings, of course, and there were not three of them, at least not according to Matthew. We do not know who they were, where they came from, or how many of them there were. We do not know how long it took them to get to Bethlehem or how old Jesus was by the time they got there. We are not even sure about that famous star.

It is not that the facts don’t matter. It is just that they don’t matter as much as the stories do, and stories can be true whether they happen or not. You do not have to do archaeology to find out if they are genuine, or spend years in the library combing ancient texts. There is another way home. You just listen to the story. You let it come to life inside of you, and then you decide on the basis of your own tears or laughter whether the story is true. If you are in any doubt, it is always a good idea to watch other people who have listened to the story—just pay attention to how the story affects them over time. Does it make them more or less human? Does it open them up or shut them down? Does it increase their capacity for joy?

From “Home By Another Way,” in Home By Another Way by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley, 1999).

Daily Reading for January 8 • Harriet Bedell, Deaconess and Missionary, 1969

St. Andrew's Mission at Stephen's Village on the Yukon River between Fort Yukon and Rampart, deserves a special word because its actual starting was the result of a really clamorous importunity on the part of the Indians themselves. So long as the white man's town of Rampart was large enough to warrant a resident missionary, Stephen's Village, with its native catechist, was visited from that post, eighty miles away. It was on a Christmas journey thither that the Rev. John Huhn, our last resident clergyman at Rampart, contracted the illness from which he died, in 1906. He is buried on the hill above the old native village near Rampart, in the burying ground of the Indians whom he loved.

As Rampart decayed many of the natives who had flocked thither when it was prosperous (to their demoralization and general detriment) returned to the more eligible Indian residence at Stephen's Village, situate just on the edge of the Yukon Flats, ten or twelve miles above the abrupt beginning of the Lower Ramparts of the Yukon. The village thus grew by accretions until it numbered nearly an hundred souls. There had been a Government school there for a few years, but it burned down and was not rebuilt (for lack of funds) and the teacher was withdrawn. Every time that the Bishop stopped there on his visitations there were eager demands for a mission of their own. At length the Bishop told them that if they would build a church themselves (so far as the log structure was concerned) he would send a missionary, and the next summer the church was built and the missionary demanded.

So Miss Effie Jackson was sent and for two years taught school and held service in the church, and a convenient cabin was built for her. She was followed by Miss Harriet Bedell, of long experience in Indian work, who for three years past has lived all alone in the village, exercising all the functions of a woman missionary and swaying almost undisputed influence over the native mind. Off the steamboat track in summer--for the steamboats do not like to cross the river amidst sandbars and make the turn necessary to reach the place unless they have freight to discharge--entirely cut off from communication in the winter, for there is now no mail route down the Yukon and the nearest post office is eighty miles away, this is one of the most isolated spots in interior Alaska, although it is situated on the main Yukon. And again this very isolation makes for more intensive educational and religious work. Such a post requires a missionary entirely absorbed and happy in the work, and such a one is Miss Bedell.

From The Alaskan Missions of the Episcopal Church: A brief sketch, historical and descriptive by Hudson Stuck, D.D., Archdeacon of the Yukon (New York: Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, 1920).

Daily Reading for January 9 • Julia Chester Emery, 1922

Julia Chester Emery is not the kind of person one expects to meet in a calendar of religious commemorations, in part because of the nature of her accomplishments. Her story does not involve extraordinary feats of courage, neither was she tortured or executed for reason of her faith. She was only twenty-four years old when she assumed the only ecclesiastical post she would ever hold, secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Episcopal Church. In that office Julia Emery served for forty years, a faithful lay woman.

By the time Julia Emery left her post in 1916, she had helped organize branches of the Woman’s Auxiliary in nearly two-thirds of the eighty-five hundred parishes of the Episcopal Church. Moreover, the Auxiliary itself dispensed many dollars in financial aid to missions and raised the awareness of the larger church to the important work of outreach.

Julia Emery reminds us that the most difficult and demanding work of mission is the most mundane, the work of administration and education. Increasingly, missionary work involves not exotic travel or rare courage; far less does it involve a zeal for conversion to one’s own ideals or methods. Instead, modern mission demands just those qualities Julia Emery devoted to service—gifts for educating, organizing, and administering.

We remember Julia Emery for raising funds, organizing volunteers, administering institutions, and educating lay members of the church. Apparently, her only training for this ministry was a willingness to try it, for she possessed no special education or preparation. Her only authority was collegial, for being a lay woman, she had neither the office nor the perquisites of ordained status to buttress her leadership. Julia Emery reminds us that we all possess the resources we need to be effective missionaries, except perhaps the two most important qualities exemplified in her—a willingness to try and the commitment to stick with it, even for a lifetime.

From Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Daily Reading for January 10 • William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

The ‘unity,’ then, ‘of the Spirit,’ to which the apostle exhorts, includes both; both concord in mind and affections, and love of charitable unity, which comes from the Spirit of God, and returns to it. And, indeed, the grace of God’s Spirit is that alone which makes men truly at peace and unity one with another. To Him it is to be attributed, not to us, saith Saint Augustine. It is ‘He that makes men to be of one mind in an house.’ Now one mind in the Church, and one mind in the State, come from the same fountain with ‘one mind in an house;’ all from ‘the Spirit.’ And so the Apostle clearly, ‘one body, and one Spirit,’ that is, ‘one body,’ by ‘one Spirit.’ For it is ‘the Spirit’ that joins all the members of the Church into ‘one body.’ And it is the Church that blesses the State, not simply with ‘unity,’ but with that unity with which itself is blessed of God. A State not Christian may have ‘unity’ in it. Yes; and so may a State that hath lost all Christianity, save the name. But ‘unity of the Spirit’ nor Church nor State can longer hold, than they do in some measure obey the ‘Spirit,’ and love the ‘unity.’

This ‘unity of the Spirit’ is closer than any corporal union can be; for spirits meet where bodies cannot, and nearer than bodies can. The reason is given by Saint Chrysostom: because the soul or spirit of man is more simple, and of one form. And the soul apter in itself to union is made more apt by the Spirit of God which is ‘one,’ and loves nothing but as it tends to one. Nay, as the Spirit of God is one, and cannot dissent from itself, no more ought they whom the Spirit hath joined in one; and the Spirit hath joined the Church in one; therefore he that divides the unity of the Church, practices against the ‘unity of the Spirit.’

And now I cannot but wonder what words Saint Paul, were he now alive, would use, to call back ‘unity’ into dismembered Christendom. For my part, death were easier to me, than it is to see and consider the face of the Church of Christ scratched and torn, till it bleeds in every part, as it doth this day.

From Sermons Before King Charles’s Third Parliament by William Laud, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Daily Reading for January 11

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak—even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. “Be not afraid,” says another, “for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen for the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.

From The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982).

Daily Reading for January 12 • Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, 1167

When God created man, in order to commend more highly the good of society, he said: “it is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like unto himself.” It was from no similar, nor even from the same, material that divine Might formed this help mate, but as a clearer inspiration to charity and friendship he produced the woman from the very substance of the man. How beautiful it is that the second human being was taken from the side of the first, so that nature might teach that human beings are equal and, as it were, collateral, and that there is in human affairs neither a superior nor an inferior, a characteristic of true friendship.

Hence, nature from the very beginning implanted the desire for friendship and charity in the heart of man, a desire which an inner sense of affection soon increased with a taste of sweetness. But after the fall of the first man, when with the cooling of charity concupiscence made secret inroads and caused private good to take precedence over the common weal, it corrupted the splendor of friendship and charity through avarice and envy, introducing contentions, emulations, hates and suspicions because the morals of men had been corrupted. From that time the good distinguished between charity and friendship, observing that love ought to be extended even to the hostile and perverse, while no union of will and ideas can exist between the good and wicked. And so friendship which, like charity, was first preserved among the all by all, remained according to the natural law among the few good. They saw the sacred laws of faith and society violated by many and bound themselves together by a closer bond of love and friendship. In the midst of the evils which they saw and felt, they rested in the joy of mutual charity.

From Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx (Cistercian Publications, 1977).

Daily Reading for January 13 • The Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord

Christ is bathed in light; let us also be bathed in light. Christ is baptized; let us also go down with him, and rise with him.

John is baptizing when Jesus draws near. Perhaps he comes to sanctify his baptizer; certainly he comes to bury sinful humanity in the waters. He comes to sanctify the Jordan for our sake and in readiness for us; he who is spirit and flesh comes to begin a new creation through the Spirit and water.

The Baptist protests; Jesus insists. Then John says: “I ought to be baptized by you.” He is the lamp in the presence of the sun, the voice in the presence of the Word, the friend in the presence of the Bridegroom, the greatest of all born of woman in the presence of the firstborn of all creation, the one who leapt in his mother’s womb in the presence of him who was adored in the womb, the forerunner and future forerunner in the presence of him who has already come and is to come again. “I ought to be baptized by you;” we should also add: “and for you,” for John is to be baptized in blood, washed clean like Peter, not only by the washing of his feet.

Jesus rises from the waters; the world rises with him.

From Oration 39 by Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople (389), quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for January 14

A voice from heaven tells Jesus he is a beloved son who is well pleasing. Close your eyes. Silently or aloud say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Then in your mind’s eye, see Jesus and imagine his unspoken response.

Now visualize what it would be like for you to have God descend upon you. Ask yourself:
—If that were to happen in my life, what might I have to give up or take on?
—The word beloved—what does it mean to be a beloved one?

Look around your office or school or dining room table and wonder:
—Who has ever called me a beloved son, daughter, friend, spouse, lover, or colleague?
—From whom do I yearn to hear those words?
—To whom have I given that blessing?
—Who has waited and still waits to hear me say: “You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased”?

From Finding Jesus, Discovering Self: Passages to Healing and Wholeness by Caren Goldman and William Dols. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Daily Reading for January 15

It was not until I became part of the leadership of the Montgomery bus protest that I was actually confronted with the trials of life. Almost immediately after the protest had been undertaken, we began to receive threatening telephone calls and letters in our home. . . . After a particularly strenuous day, I had reached the saturation point. I was ready to give up. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage seemed almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers, I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced Him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared.

Three nights later, our home was bombed. Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My experience with God had given me new strength and trust. I knew now that God is able to give us the interior resources to face the storms and problems of life. Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future.

From Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981).

Daily Reading for January 16

The desert fathers withdrew from ordinary society and sought the solitude of the desert. This was the first step in their ‘spirituality’. Then they placed themselves under spiritual fathers. After that, the daily life was their prayer, and it was a radically simple life: a stone hut with a roof of branches, a reed mat for a bed, a sheep-skin, a lamp, a vessel for water or oil. It was enough.

The aim of the monks’ lives was not asceticism, but God, and the way to God was charity. The gentle charity of the desert was the pivot of all their work and the test of their way of life. Charity was to be total and complete. Antony the Great said, ‘My life is with my brother’, and he himself returned to the city twice, once to relieve those dying of plague, and once to defend the faith against heresy. The old men of the desert received guests as Christ would receive them. They might live austerely themselves, but when visitors came they hid their austerity and welcomed them. A brother said, ‘Forgive me, father, for I have made you break your rule’, but the old man said, ‘My rule is to receive you with hospitality and send you on your way in peace.’

From The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers by Sister Benedicta Ward SLG (SLG Press, 1975).

Daily Reading for January 17 • Antony, Abbot in Egypt, 356

Abba Antony said, ‘Whatever you find in your heart to do in following God, that do, and remain within yourself in Him.’ This personal integrity before God, without any disguises or pretensions, is the essence of the spirituality of the desert. All ascetic effort, all personal relationships, life in all its aspects, was to be brought slowly into the central relationship with God in Christ. All the means to this end were just that, means and no more; they could be changed or discarded as necessary. The Sayings of the desert fathers must be used in the spirit in which they were spoken, otherwise they will have less than their true value. They are not just for interest but for use. Radical simplicity and integrity is their aim and purpose.

From The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers by Sister Benedicta Ward SLG (SLG Press, 1975).

Daily Reading for January 18 • The Confession of St. Peter the Apostle

From apostolic times, Jesus has been spoken of, and proclaimed, as the Christ, the anointed One. While such usage is common in the earliest Christian preaching, it is not common in the Gospel accounts, although Peter proclaims Jesus as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8.29; Matt. 16.16; Luke 9.20). However, Mark tells us that Jesus forbade his disciples to speak of this (Mark 8.30), and he himself does not speak of himself as the Christ (apart from the two references in Matt. 23.10 and Mark 9.41 which are from secondary sources). Christ, Messiah, was not at this time a divine or even supernatural title, but was associated with an act of earthly liberation, with the restoration of Israel. Whether Jesus ever specifically accepted the title is not clear. When asked by the High Priest about the claim to messianic status, he seems to have accepted it (Mark 14.61; Matt. 26.63) though this may simply reflect the early Church’s view. Yet within a generation of the crucifixion the name ‘Christian’ was being used in Antioch (Acts 11.26), and King Agrippa II knows and understands this usage (26.28).

In view of the clear centrality of the identification of Jesus with the Christ/Messiah in the early Church’s preaching, it is significant that there is so little evidence in the Synoptics, or even in John, for an explicit claim from the lips of Jesus himself. Had there been more evidence to produce, the early Church would surely have produced it in support of their belief. . . . It was out of the experience of what Jesus had achieved, in his ministry, death, and resurrection, and out of reflection on this achievement in the light of the Jewish hope, that the early Christians came quickly to see Jesus as the Messiah.

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (Harper and Row, 1985).

Daily Reading for January 19 • Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, 1095

Isaiah the prophet wrote about the sevenfold gift of God in his prophesy about the Holy Spirit and about his sevenfold gifts. The sevenfold gifts are named thus: sapientia in Latin, that is wisdom in English; intellectus in Latin, that is understanding in English; consilium in Latin, that is counsel in English; fortitude in Latin, strength of spirit in English; scientia in Latin, good sense in English; pietas in Latin, piety in English; timor Domini in Latin, the fear of God in English. These sevenfold gifts truly were in our Lord in perfection, and the Holy Spirit still daily distributes them to Christians, each according to his desire and his spirit’s eagerness, just as bishops in confirmation eagerly long for God himself.

And indeed that person has wisdom through the gift of God who lives wisely and always considers how he might please God. And he has good sense through God’s gift who always turns it toward his Lord’s will with good works. And he has good counsel through God’s gift who ever guides himself about what is to be done and what to be left undone. And he has strength of spirit through God’s gift who can forebear and endure much and ever be patient in every humility and again in good occurrences not forsake his diligence but be always discreet in every way so that he be not too glad in joy or too despondent in woe. And he has good sense through God’s gift who loves goodness and innocence and is better within than he is thought without and knows for himself the difference between truth and untruth. And he has piety through God’s gift who is devout and shows respect to other people, to his peers and also to his subordinates and does not want to despise or shame the other with words or deeds. And then the fear of God is the seventh gift of these spiritual gifts, and this gift is the beginning of all wisdom. And he who has the fear of God fully by no means forsakes many of the things that are necessary for his soul to have and to hold.

From “On the Sevenfold Gifts of the Spirit” by Wulfstan, quoted in Anglo-Saxon Spirituality: Selected Writings, translated and introduced by Robert Boenig, in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 2000).

Daily Reading for January 20 • The Second Sunday After the Epiphany

In the mystery of our Lord’s incarnation there were clear indications of his eternal Godhead. Yet the great events we celebrate today disclose and reveal in different ways the fact that God himself took a human body. Mortals, enshrouded always in darkness, must not be left in ignorance, and so be deprived of what they can understand and retain only by grace.

In choosing to be born for us, God chose to be known by us. He therefore reveals himself in this way, in order that this great sacrament of his love may not be an occasion for us of great misunderstanding.

Today the Magi find, crying in a manger, the one they have followed as he shone in the sky. Today the Magi see clearly, in swaddling clothes, the one they have long awaited as he lay hidden among the stars.

Today Christ enters the Jordan to wash away the sin of the world. John himself testifies that this is why he has come: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.” Today a servant lays his hand on the Lord, a man lays his hand on God, John lays his hand on Christ, not to forgive but to receive forgiveness.

Today Christ works the first of his signs from heaven by turning water into wine. But water [mixed with wine] has still to be changed into the sacrament of his blood, so that Christ may offer spiritual drink from the chalice of his body, to fulfill the psalmist’s prophecy: “How excellent is my chalice, warming my spirit.”

From a sermon of Peter Chrysologus, Bishop of Ravenna [450], quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for January 21 • Agnes, Martyr at Rome, 304

The Word who becomes all things for us is close to us, our Lord Jesus Christ who promises to remain with us always. He cries out, saying: “See, I am with you all the days of this age.” He himself is the shepherd, the high priest, the way and the door, and has become all things at once for us. It was Christ who shed his light on the psalmist as he prayed: “You are my joy, deliver me from those surrounding me.” True joy, genuine festival, means the casting out of wickedness. To achieve this one must live a life of perfect goodness and, in the serenity of the fear of God, practice contemplation in one’s heart.

This was the way of the saints, who in their lifetime and at every stage of life rejoiced as at a feast. Because of their holy lives they gained freedom, and now keep festival in heaven. They rejoice after their pilgrimage in shadows, and now distinguish the reality from the promise.

From an Easter Letter by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria [373], quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for January 22 • Vincent, Deacon of Saragossa and Martyr, 304

Another early deacon with close ties to his bishop was Vincent of Saragossa, martyred on 22 January 304. Vincent was not only the eyes and ears of his bishop, but literally his mouth. Because Valerius stuttered badly, Vincent often preached for him. According to legend, they were arrested by the governor of Spain, threatened with torture and death, and pressured to renounce their faith. Vincent said, “Father, if you order me, I will speak.” Valerius replied, “Son, as I have committed you to dispense the word of God, so I now charge you to answer in vindication of the faith which we defend.” Vincent defied the governor and was tortured to death. . . .

Scholars may question the historical accuracy of these legends about Laurence and Vincent, Apollonia and Thekla, and other early martyrs, but they tell us a good deal about deacons in the early church. They stood close to their bishop, they brought help to the poor and brought the word to the people, and they held the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience, even to death.

From Many Servants: An Introduction to Deacons by Ormonde Plater (Cowley Publications, 1991).

Daily Reading for January 23 • Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893

I find myself pitying the friends of my youth, who died when we were twenty-five years old, because whatever may be the richness of the life to which they have gone, and in which they have been living ever since, they never can know that particular manifestation of Christ which He makes to us here on earth, at each successive period of our human life. All experience comes to be but more and more of pressure of His life on ours. It cannot come by one flash of light, or one great convulsive event. It comes without haste and without rest in this perpetual living of our life with Him. And all the history, of outer or inner life, of the changes of circumstances, or the changes of thought, gets its meaning and value from this constantly growing relation to Christ.

I cannot tell you how personal this grows to me. He is here. He knows me and I know Him. It is no figure of speech. It is the realest thing in the world. And every day makes it realer. And one wonders with delight what it will grow to as the years go on.

Less and less, I think, grows the consciousness of seeking God. Greater and greater grows the certainty that He is seeking us and giving Himself to us to the complete measure of our present capacity. That is Love,--not that we loved Him, but that He loved us. I am sure that we ought to dwell far more upon God’s love for us than on our love for Him. There is such a thing as putting ourselves in the way of God’s overflowing love and letting it break upon us till the response of love to Him comes, not by struggle, not even by deliberation, but by necessity, as the echo comes when the sound strikes the rock.

From Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Daily Reading for January 24 • Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi, First Woman Priest in the Anglican Communion, 1944

The first woman priest in the Anglican Communion was not an American. In a curious parallel to the seating of Elizabeth Dyer in the House of Deputies in 1946, the upheaval of wartime had also made possible the 1944 ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi by Ronald O. Hall, the bishop of Hong Kong, to provide priestly ministrations to Chinese Americans under the Japanese occupation. When word of the ordination reached England, Bishop Hall was roundly denounced and Li Tim-Oi agreed to suspend her sacramental ministry to protect Hall from punitive action. Her subsequent disappearance throughout the years China was closed to the West made it easy for the Anglican Communion to resist dealing with the implications of her ordination, but Li Tim-Oi’s ordination reminds us that the issue was by no means an American invention of the 1960s. In fact, women’s ordination to the priesthood had been urged by women’s rights activists on both sides of the Atlantic since the turn of the century, and was first alluded to in a Lambeth Conference report of 1920. . . .

On February 11, 1989, before a jubilant crowd of eight thousand people in the Hynes Auditorium in Boston, Barbara Clementine Harris was consecrated suffragan bishop of the most populous diocese in the American church. . . . Everything about the service testified to the fact that the old order was changing. The preacher was Harris’s mentor, Paul Washington, rector of the Church of the Advocate which had hosted the Philadelphia ordinations fifteen years earlier. Joining Bishop Harris around the altar to concelebrate the Eucharist were Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first Anglican woman ordained to the priesthood in 1944, and Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven. . . . A woman had become a bishop, and the episcopacy had been transformed: no longer a male preserve, it had become an image of human leadership within a community of diverse men and women united in Christ’s service.

From New Wine: The Story of Women Transforming Leadership and Power in the Episcopal Church by Pamela W. Darling (Cowley Publications, 1994).

Daily Reading for January 25 • The Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle

We have come together in the presence of Almighty God to pray for the recovery of the unity of Christ’s Church, and for the renewal of our common life in Jesus Christ in whom we are all made one.

Silence

Let us give heed to the words of Holy Scripture which set forth God’s will and purpose for the unity of his Church.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will.

“There is one body, and one Spirit, as there is also one hope held out in God’s call to you; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will.

“For Christ is like a single body with its many limbs and organs which, many as they are, together make up one body. For indeed we were all brought into one body by baptism, in the one Spirit, whether we are Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and that one Holy Spirit was poured out for all of us to drink.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will.

“But it is not for these alone that I pray, but for those also who through their words put their faith in me; may they all be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will. Amen.

A litany for The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity from Prayers for Today’s Church, quoted in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised and updated edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery Rowthorn with W. Alfred Tisdale. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Daily Reading for January 26 • Timothy and Titus, Companions of St. Paul

Heavenly Father
you sent your apostle Paul to preach the gospel
and gave him Timothy and Titus
to be his companions in the faith:
grant that our fellowship in the Spirit
may bear witness to the name of Jesus;
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit
one God, now and for ever.

Collect for the Feast of Timothy and Titus from An Anglican Prayer Book 1989 of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (HarperCollins, 1989).

Daily Reading for January 27 • The Third Sunday After the Epiphany

If persons and communities follow Jesus and proclaim the kingdom of God to the poor; if they strive for liberation from every kind of slavery; if they seek, for all human beings, especially for the immense majority of men and women who are crucified persons, a life in conformity with the dignity of daughters and sons of God; if they have the courage and forthrightness to speak the truth, however this may translate into the denunciation and unmasking of sin, and steadfastness in the conflicts and persecution occasioned by this forthrightness; if, in this discipleship of Jesus, they effectuate their own conversion from being oppressors to being men and women of service; if they have the spirit of Jesus, with the bowels of mercy and the pure heart to see the truth of things, and refuse to darken their hearts by imprisoning the truth of things in injustice; if in doing justice they seek peace and in making peace they seek to base it on justice; and if they do all this in the following and discipleship of Jesus because he did all this himself—then they believe in Jesus Christ.

From Jesus in Latin America by Jon Sobrino (Orbis Books, 1987).

Daily Reading for January 28 • Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Friar, 1274

Though involved in numerous ecclesiastical and civil affairs, Thomas Aquinas was primarily a theological thinker and writer. The only comparable figure in previous church history is Augustine, and Aquinas quotes his distinguished predecessor more frequently than any other of the Fathers. But unlike Augustine, Aquinas was a systematizer with a neat, orderly mind that delighted in logical and dialectical coherence. Aiding him in this architectonic ideal was the newly rediscovered Aristotle, whose precision of definition and syllogistic distinctions provided Aquinas with the philosophical instrument he needed for his theological construction. Thus in Aquinas both Augustine and Aristotle meet, and the synthesis added an astonishing brilliance to such perennial problems as the relation of revelation and reason.

There are two distinct lines of development in Christian theology. One comes out of the Hebrew-Christian tradition and the other from the Greco-Roman philosophy and culture. The so-called Thomistic synthesis brought the two into functional coexistence.

From Readings in Christian Thought, edited by Hugh T. Kerr (Abingdon, 1983).

Daily Reading for January 29

To restore man, who had been laid low by sin, to the heights of divine glory, the Word of the eternal Father, though containing all things within His immensity, willed to become small. This He did, not by putting aside His greatness, but by taking to Himself our littleness.

The reparation of human nature could not be effected by Adam or by any other purely human being. For no individual man ever occupied a position of preeminence over the whole of nature; nor can any mere man be the cause of grace. Nothing remains, therefore, but that such restoration could be effected by God alone.

There are also other reasons for the divine Incarnation. Man had withdrawn from spiritual things and had delivered himself up wholly to material things, from which he was unable by his own efforts to make his way back to God. Therefore divine Wisdom, who had made man, took to Himself a bodily nature and visited man immersed in things of the body, so that by the mysteries of His bodily life He might recall man to spiritual life.

At the same time, by willing to become man, God clearly displayed the immensity of His love for men, so that henceforth men might serve God, no longer out of fear of death, which the first man had scorned, but out of the love of charity.

From Compendium of Theology by Thomas Aquinas, translated by Cyril Vollert (B. Herder, 1948).

Daily Reading for January 30

Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen,
Who thy glory hidest ’neath these shadows mean;
Lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed,
Tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.

Taste, and touch, and vision, to discern thee fail;
Faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.
I believe whate’er the Son of God hath told;
What the Truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.

O memorial wondrous of the Lord’s own death;
Living Bread, that givest all thy creatures breath,
Grant my spirit ever by thy life may live,
To my taste thy sweetness never-failing give.

Jesus, whom now veiled, I by faith descry,
What my soul doth thirst for, do not, Lord, deny,
That thy face unveiled, I at last may see,
With the blissful vision blest, my God, of thee.

Thomas Aquinas, c. 1260; hymnal version, 1939. Hymn 204 in The Hymnal 1940 (Church Pension Fund, 1940).

Daily Reading for January 31

“And who can describe in words the supreme beauty of this church, and the countless wonders of that minster—of that city as we may say, if it can rightly be called a city when it is surrounded by no circuit of walls? But because countless people come together in it, it earns the name ‘city’ from the gathering of crowds there. This city is supreme and metropolitan, in whose suburbs, which holy Brigit marked out with a precise boundary, is feared no mortal adversary nor onslaught of enemies. But it is the safest city of refuge, with all its external suburbs, in the whole land of the Irish for all fugitives. . . . And who can count the varied crowds and countless peoples flocking together from all provinces? Some come because of the abundance of feasts, others to obtain healing of their ailments, others to stare at the crowds; others bring great gifts and offerings to the celebration of holy Brigit’s birth.”

Thus the seventh-century Irishman Cogitosus praised Kildare. He was writing in a tradition, suffused with biblical conceptions of cities of refuge and the heavenly city, which presented the minsters of Ireland as places of safety, centrality, and popular resort as well as places of cult. The main centres of early Christian Ireland were indeed its monastic sites, and several of them have now yielded archaeological evidence for complex zoning of activities, including specialized craft production and industry, during the seventh to ninth centuries.

From The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society by John Blair (Oxford, 2005).