Being the compulsive blogger that I am, an end-of-the-year post is unavoidable. Because I have spent most of the morning finishing my homily for the first Sunday of Advent, I am kind of drained. It seems like there is always something to do. For the most part I am grateful for that, as having too much time on my hands (to quote the old
Styx song) is dangerous for me.
Over the past several days I have been reading the first volume of Eugene H. Peterson's projected five volume spiritual theology (four volumes are published), which takes its title from a line in a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology. This book doesn't take my breath away, it gives me breath, that is, inspires me. I have been resisting the temptation to just fill my blog with insights from this very credible tome.
It is appropriate as we prepare to embark on a new year of grace to remember that
"[w]orship is the primary means for forming us as participants in God's work, but if the blinds are drawn while we wait for Sunday, we aren't in touch with the work that God is actually doing" (pg. 71). Why? Because as Manley Hopkins so beautifully observed:
"Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his,
To the Father through the features of men's faces."*
title from the song Closing Time by Semisonic
