Whispering in God's Ear

I've always had difficulty with the Easter story, but never the birth of Christ.  Only recently have I been able to make any sort of connection between the two. As a child growing up in the 50's, I loved singing Christmas carols and hearing the story about the Baby Jesus.  Interestingly, I learned those songs and the story of Christ's birth not at church, but at school.  Back in the 1950's, life was a little different.  The US was predominantly Christian, so it wasn't unusual to talk about Christmas in school.  I don't believe that we should do that in schools in this day and age, considering all the different faiths represented in our country today. (That's a topic for another posting.) But that's how the story reached me. As a child I was not allowed to attend church, even though my mother was a Spanish teacher at a Catholic school.  My father was a "devote" atheist and forbid me to attend church until I was "old enough to make a de...

I'm not an overly patient person, though I do believe I've gained a bit of it over the years--as a wife, a mother, and a co-worker--mainly out of necessity. One area in which I still struggle with working at patience is when I am feeling an emotion whose source I can't immediately identify. I don't know if is part of our American culture or just a human trait, but I've noticed that so many of us become self-involved in needing to know why we are feeling some emotion at a particular moment. "I'm not happy today. I wonder if it is because it is cloudy outside, or because I'm facing a big challenge at work. Or maybe it's because my spouse isn't paying enough attention to me, or maybe I ate something that didn't agree with me, or (my favorite) maybe I'm just depressed." (I'm not talking about clinical depression here.) It's only recently that I've come to realize that trying to figure out through my intellect why I am feeli...

Lately, I've been making a concerted effort to increase the number of times I pray during the day. To do this, I've found several books that I'd like to share with you: The Divine Hours, Pocket Edition , by Phyllis Tickle.  It is a rather traditional prayer guide with different Offices of Prayer.  This, if I understand it clearly, is in the monastic tradition of praying several times a day. All of the offices are done on the hour or half hour. The first office is "The Office of Midnight" between 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. The next one is the "Office of the Night Watch" between 1:30 and 4:30 a.m. This is followed by the "Office of Dawn" between 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. The next is the "Morning Office" between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Then there is the "Midday Office" between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. After that is the "Vespers Office" between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., followed by the "Office of Compline" "To Be Observe...