Anamchara Books

12/06/2025

12/06/2025

Sadly, it seems like this song gets more appropriate every year! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote it on Christmas Day 1863, during his own dark days. His wife of 18 years had died in a house fire two years previously, and his oldest son, who had joined the Union Army without his father's blessing, had been severely wounded in battle shortly before Christmas. His son survived, but Longfellow's Christmas was nevertheless overshadowed by the Civil War's violence and division. May his hope give us hope.

12/06/2025

I grew up singing, "My heart was black with sin," words that have so much wrong with them on SO many levels. I was taught that my heart was a place of sin and evil, a place Jesus could not enter without the precise formula of a specific invitation. But Jesus said, "The Realm of Heaven is within you," and his follower Paul wrote, "The spirit of God dwells within you." As the thirteenth-century Christian mystic, John of Ruysbroeck, wrote: "Grace flows from within our hearts and not from outside our hearts; for God is more inward to us than we are to ourselves. God works in us from within outwards." May you discover in the Life-Giver your true Self—and discover the Life-Giver in your true Self.

12/05/2025

As some of our less friendly commenters love to point out, Christmas is also a Pagan holiday, and this applies to our favorite Christmas saint as well, good old St. Nick. The Life-Giver finds expression in many ways, unbothered by our human classifications. In the season's celebration of Light, there is room for all to be included.

12/04/2025

Stories about the three wise women—Mary, Elizabeth, & Anna—challenge us to also say “yes” to the amazing possibilities of God’s wondrous world-changing love.