Modern research is uncovering a rich canon of composition by women behind the closed doors of medieval convents. There, nuns were free to express their emotions through the glory of polyphony, which would in turn, and mostly uncited, influence Monteverdi and many other baroque masters.
"Please, let us not make Christmas worldly! Let us not put aside the one being celebrated" -- which is what happened at Jesus' birth when so many of "his own people did not accept him," Pope Francis said.
I dread to think how Christmas will be marked in a hundred years’ time, by when most people will be totally ignorant of how it all began. “What happened on the very first Christmas, children?”
I’ve never been happy with some of my activist friends who send out Christmas cards with messages like: May the Peace of Christ Disturb You!Can’t we have one day a year to be happy and celebrate without having our already unhappy selves shaken with more guilt? Isn’t Christmas a time when we can enjoy being children again?
Instantly recognisable for its tall, domed shape, panettone is pinpointed for its two main associations: with Christmas and with Italy. But it’s much more than a holiday cake. Merry Christmas. May the Infant Jesus fill all of us with Joy, Hope and Peace.
God, it seems, favors the powerless, the unnoticed, children, babies, outsiders, and refugees with no resources or place to go.That’s why Jesus was born outside the city, in a stable, unnoticed, outside all fanfare, away from all major media, and away from all the persons and events that were deemed important at the time, humble and anonymous. God works like that. Why?
On the evening before another day of protests by the “Yellow Vests” movement, and while many commentators were predicting outbursts of widespread violence, the Archbishop of Paris turned towards the Virgin Mary, asking her to “look after our country” and to help the protesters return to the path of dialogue.
What’s still unfinished in your life? Well, there’s always a lot that’s unfinished in everyone’s life. Nothing is ever really finished. Our lives, it seems, are simply interrupted by our dying. Most of us don’t complete our lives, we just run out of time. So, consciously or unconsciously, we make a bucket-list of things we still want to see, do, and finish before we die.
I live on both sides of a border. Not a geographical one, but one which is often a dividing line between two groups. I was raised a conservative Roman Catholic, and conservative in most other things as well. Although my dad worked politically for the Liberal party, most everything about my upbringing was conservative, particularly religiously.
Japan is a country on the margins of Christianity, a nation in which the missionary flame lit by its first evangelist, St Francis Xavier, for whose faith countless thousands of martyrs were slaughtered, has since sunk to a faint flicker.