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Morning Devotion for the Season of Christmas
January 1, 2025
I’ve long appreciated that the beginning of a new calendar year occurs midway through the short season of Christmastide. Somewhere between the quiet awakening of Mary’s pondering and the eventual arrival of the Magi, bearing witness with tangible gifts, we mark a break in chronological time. The turn of the year seems to offer a newness in keeping with the greater newness that the Incarnation has brought.
Below is a short excerpt from Brian Doyle’s book Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies. For him, newness was never constrained to novelty. It was available any time he looked out onto and into the world. He truly saw it as God’s ever-ongoing creation – every, every moment. And he spent his life sharing this through his writing, which, though always candid and honest, never waned in exuberance.
Credo - Brian Doyle
Credo, Latin for “I believe,” which I do, very strongly, in a number of things.
I believe that there is a mysterious and graceful and miraculous Coherence stitched through this world.
I believe that this life is an extraordinary gift, a blink of bright light between vast darknesses.
I believe that the fingerprints of the Maker are everywhere: children, hawks, water.
I believe that even sadness and tragedy and evil are part of that Mind we cannot comprehend but only thank, a Mind especially to be thanked, oddly, when it is most inscrutable…
I believe that everything is a prayer…
I believe that family is a peculiar and powerful corporation, lurching toward light, webbed by love, a whole ridiculously bigger than its parts.
I believe additionally that friends are family…
I believe that the best of all possible breakfasts is a pear with a ferocious cup of coffee, taken near the ocean, rather later in the morning than earlier, preferably in the company of a small, sleepy child still in her or his rumpled and warm pajamas, his or her skin as warm and tawny as a cougar pelt.
I believe that love is our greatest and hardest work.
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May we all, both individually and corporately, enjoy a blessed 2025.
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