Rev. Ryan's Reflection of the Week

What a delightful sunday of worship and feasting we enjoyed together on Advent 3!

And now we are reflecting on the theme of JOY this week. . . here are some thoughts to encourage us and inspire us on the way.

--The Prayer of Hope (Yes. . .  And) that we prayed together on Sunday is such a gritty, realistic and yet "percolating with joy" kind of prayer. See the prayer attached in this newsletter. The closing stanza is good for us to reflect on . .  in the wake of my exhortation for us to be "joy-restorers" in those places that we are working or socializing in this week.

"Make me capable of great joy,
great love,
great risk,
great fear,
as you expand my heart. . . "

What I am reminded of with this prayer is that it is God who leads and empowers us. . we are not left to do "joy-restoring" work in our own strength. May the joy of the Lord be our strength.

 --And I offer this "point to ponder" on the legend of dear St. Nick. I'm reflecting on this thoughtful quote about the "real presence" of Santa Claus and how seeing many Santa Claus appearances in the days ahead, may point us to the worship of our Lord. . . read the quote below from Gertrud Mueller Nelson:

 "I don’t want to get rid of Santa Claus. But I think that we need to give our Santa Claus, who has evolved out of a very ancient Saint Nicholas, a closer examination. A myth is an exceptionally difficult thing to kill, for it continues to be devastatingly revealing even when we have tampered with it and changed its form by our rationalizations or our moralistic applications.  A figure who can endure with such tenacity ever since the fourth century, and with a stunning continuity of legends and similarity of iconographic representations in so many countries, has got to be real. He may well be the most popular saint the world has ever known, whether he was ever real in history or not. His legends cannot be brushed aside as 'mere' myths because they live on into the present and refuse to die while stories in history, on the other hand, deal with what is dead and passed. Santa Claus is the father figure we all dream about and share in our collective unconscious. He is a 'type' of God the father, primal and powerful and, yes, real."