IrvingD

The alarm kept its shrill appointment with me at 5:45 A.M. yesterday. I had only a few short hours of sleep as a result of burning some midnight oil and the awakening was not welcome. Moments after I turned off the buzzer, the familiar pings of a text message sounded on my Blackberrry. Who would text me this early? It was from my music teacher friend, Shanan, who wrote: "Snow day today. Go back to bed." No sooner than that happened, the all news radio station I wake up to announced that all New York City Public Schools are closed today. Yes! I texted Shanan back, "Hallelujah!" Went downstairs for a glass of water. Received a text from my daughter that there's no school. And went back to bed. The second snow day this winter. At eleven I got up, made coffee, and watched the gentle snowflakes fall. Of the many ways to relax, there is probably nothing that matches watching a steady windless snowfall of preferably large flakes. Peaceful. With coffee in hand, I surren...

One of my warmest early childhood memories is watching the Winter Olympics accompanied by a cup of tea and LU imported biscuits. I can remember back to the 1956 and 1960 games when I was four and eight-years-old respectively. My parents would gather around the Zenith black and white television with friends on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to watch downhill skiing and figure skating. I stood at the coffee table fascinated by the skiing and bored by the skating, but always eager to dip another petit-beurre in my cup of hot tea with milk and sugar. Laughter and conversation in four languages from the adults mingled with cow bells and the sportscaster's voice coming from the TV making a blanket of sound that covered the tea, the cookies, and me. No cozier spot could be found on a cold day in February.

While no one can explain how God can be both One and Three at the same time, one can affirm the Unity of God while acknowledging also the Three-ness of Persons within that Unity. The Biblical record leaves us with just that situation. Jesus comes not merely as a human teacher with unique--even divine--qualities, he comes as someone who is as much God as he is a Man. He is no avatar, or appearance of deity in human form, but God in the flesh--incarnate--as Christian teaching describes him. Jesus is fully human. Jesus is fully Divine. Yet he bears a relationship with God as Father, separate yet equal. We also encounter in Scripture a figure separate from the Father and the Son yet, at the same time, equally God with them. The Holy Spirit makes his appearance in the symbolic form of a dove during Jesus' baptism and as a wind storm of fiery tongues on the day of Pentecost in the Upper Room where 120 disciples awaited his empowerment. From the beginning, those devout Jews who became Jes...

Some things must die before other better things arise. Jesus understood the dynamics of the spiritual life and He related that life to things we could understand. He said: “Very truly, I tellyou, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24) . From a single seed you get a whole plant yielding many seeds for food and nourishment. But the single seed must first “die”—be placed in the ground, buried—before it germinates and grows. Spiritually speaking, so must we. Lent began today—Ash Wednesday. I recommend that we embrace Lent for what it really is: a tool for strengthening our spiritual life. Following the example of Our Lord, the ancient church understood that a forty day period of focused discipline helps us to concentrate on that dying which Jesus spoke about. Lent isn’t merely about “giving up” something; it’s about dying to oneself, about actively putting to death those character flaws ...

Yesterday I visited an old friend. My daughter, her boyfriend, and I went to the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. When Renee was small, we went there regularly-so regularly that she used to call the place, "my museum." Like so many parents of young children, my wife and I joined the museum with a family membership. The savings paid off for the number of times we visited the place. That membership, long elapsed during the teen years, is no longer an advantage now. Or is it? When I paid for the three of us yesterday, I nearly passed out from the cost of general admission plus one special exhibition. Although the admission price is called a "donation," one dare not give less than the "recommended" amount! Sixty dollars later, we toured the old familiar places: the darkened corridors of glass dioramas holding what must be the largest collection of stuffed animals in the world. The 120-foot model of a blue whale still hung in the Hall of Oce...

TO KEEP A TRUE LENT by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) Is this a fast, to keep The larder lean? And clean From fat of veals and sheep? Is it to quit the dish Of flesh, yet still To fill The platter high with fish? Is it to fast an hour, Or ragg’d to go, Or show A downcast look and sour? No ; ‘tis a fast to dole Thy sheaf of wheat, And meat, Unto the hungry soul. It is to fast from strife, From old debate And hate; To circumcise thy life. To show a heart grief-rent; To starve thy sin, Not bin; And that’s to keep thy Lent.

When I decided to leave the pastoral ministry for teaching in a public school, an acquaintance asked me whether I had lost my faith. I replied, "On the contrary, I am more orthodox than ever!" The change was largely vocational--not a matter of conviction. Over the years I have succumbed to what G. K. Chesterton called the "romance of orthodoxy." This romance is not a kind of will o' the wisp feeling generated by reading Chesterton and C.S. Lewis accompanied by pints of ale and good pipe tobacco. Neither does it stem from reaction to modernity with its aversion to the supernatural for the empirical, much less is it a reaction to post-modernity with its love of chaos and disavowal of any order or meaning to things. No. My Christian orthodoxy is no rejoinder to some assertion that I previously held, it is but rather a romance with truth and beauty, with permanence transcending a transitory existence, with purpose and meaning beyond the ephemeral, with God.  ...