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Category: Feast Days

Hope in Ordinary Days

Posted on by Jeremy Frye

by Jeremy Frye

How do we live into the promise of renewal without escaping the present moment?

Hope is a quiet thing.

It’s not the same as optimism. It doesn’t deny pain or pretend that everything is fine. It isn’t, in the words of Jon Swales+, “hopium.” Hope has nothing to do with wishful thinking or spiritual cheerfulness. In fact, it usually begins in the dark, with a flicker of light we can barely see. It arrives like dawn, not as a sudden flood, but as something that must be waited for, watched for, trusted.

Hope, much like love, is only real when it’s practiced. And the place we are invited to practice it, is here. Not in the grand sweep of history or the perfection of someday, but in this unremarkable morning. In the people and places already around us. In the small acts of friendship, attention, and presence that may never make a headline but quietly restore the world one breath at a time.

The Celtic tradition held to a deeply grounded hope, a vision of God’s future that was not separated from the earth or the body or the now. Their eschatology was not about escape but about healing. They believed that the veil between the visible and invisible worlds was thin, and that heaven was not a distant realm but a present reality slowly being unveiled. The Kingdom of God wasn’t just “coming” someday, it was breaking in, quietly, through kindness, through beauty, through lives given to love.

This is a hope we can live into. Not the kind that waits passively for rescue, but the kind that opens its hands to whatever the day brings. The kind that plants things, tends things, walks the same roads again and again with the people who’ve been entrusted to us. The kind that trusts redemption is not only something to be looked forward to in the future, but a way of walking in the world now.

The sacred calendar hints at this. After the great sweep of feasts and holy days, from Passover to Tabernacles, there is one final observance: Shemini Atzeret. It’s a strange day. No explicit commandment to feast. No historical event remembered. Just a pause. A lingering. It is as though God says: “Don’t go yet. Stay with me one more day.” It is a holy invitation to dwell, to remain rooted in the love and presence of God even after the celebrations are over.

That is the rhythm of hope. Not the ecstatic rush of mountaintop experiences, but the deep, quiet choosing to stay rooted. To keep walking. To keep loving. Even when the season changes. Even when the fruit is slow to come.

We need this kind of hope now. Not more spectacle or certainty or systems. We need people who will remain rooted. Who will stay with one another through the seasons. Who will see God’s slow work of redemption unfolding not in the spectacular, but in the shared meal, the small kindness, the ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

One could argue that these are hardly ordinary days. The world feels fragile. Wars rage. Democracies strain under the weight of distrust and division. The climate changes before our eyes. Loneliness and anxiety seem to haunt nearly everyone I know. There are moments when it feels as though the whole world is trembling beneath our feet. But then again, perhaps human beings have always felt this way in times of uncertainty.

The early Celtic Christians lived in the long shadow of the collapse of the Roman world. Empires were crumbling. Violence and instability shaped daily life. Centuries later, communities endured plagues that swept through entire cities, wars that redrew nations, economic depressions, forced migrations, and seasons when it must have seemed impossible to imagine a hopeful future. And yet, in every age, ordinary people continued baking bread, tending gardens, gathering around tables, praying together, caring for children, burying the dead, singing songs of hope, and loving their neighbors as best they could. The world did not heal all at once. But even in difficult times, small acts of faithfulness carried life forward.

And I believe that this is what hope actually is; not denying the darkness, but refusing to surrender the ordinary practices of love that keep the darkness from having the final word.

 

Hope in ordinary days might look like baking bread for a neighbor. It might look like walking your child to school, or praying for someone who would never ask. It might mean saying yes to friendship again, even though you’ve been hurt. It might look like planting something, or forgiving someone, or tending something that no one else will notice.

And it always means choosing presence over escape. That is the heart of Anam Cara living: to believe that God is here, already at work, already healing, already waiting for us to join in.

So let your hope be small, and let it be faithful. Let it take the shape of daily life. Trust that Christ is not waiting for you on the other side of suffering, but walking with you through it. Trust that the Kingdom is coming quietly, in the hands of those who love.

This week, pay attention to the ordinary. What small thing might hope invite you to do today? What act of beauty or kindness might become your way of saying, “I still believe”?

Because hope isn’t a place we arrive. It’s a way of being in the world. A way of staying awake. A way of loving what is, and believing that what is being healed is already holy.

 

Photo by Kate Remmer on Unsplash

Doubt, Pain and Infanticide (Or Why The Feast of the Holy Innocents Is My Favorite Feast Day)

Posted on by Tara Owens
Featured image: François-Joseph Navez, Massacre of the Innocents

Today, December 28, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. As I shared with the glorious pilgrims in the Coming Home eCourse, it’s my favorite feast day of the year. It combines Christmastide and doubt, the hope of the resurrection and all of our questions, and here, with a little sneak peak into the course materials, is why:

(A Note On The Image Above: I chose this painting of all of the paintings of the massacre of the innocents because of its horrible peacefulness. Although I shied away from the more active scenes—and then ruefully noted my own inability to confront the real evil of this day—there is something so chilling and painful about Navez’s rendition, with the action off to the back and the grief front and center, that speaks to this commemoration well.)

You may think me morbid, but the Feast of the Holy Innocents is one of my favorite feast days of the entire Church calendar. It’s not because of the brutality of what it commemorates, but because of what this particular feast makes space for both in my heart and in the worship and life of the Church as a whole.

In Matthew 2:16 the Gospel writer tells of Herod’s rage at being deceived by the magi and his subsequent order to have all male children under two years (which at the time would have most likely meant age one and younger) in Bethlehem and surrounding area killed. This horrific act was completely consistent with Herod’s character (it is well documented historically that he had his own sons killed), and is a terrible reminder of the cost of pursuing goodness and life in the face of great evil.

The Church recognizes those children killed by Herod as martyrs, whether or not their parents were believers, because they themselves took the place of the one Herod was after—Jesus. Over the years, the killings grew in the imagination of the Church, with numbers being cited in the hundreds of thousands, while the reality of the population of Bethlehem and area indicates that the number of children killed was between six and twenty.

Whatever the actual number of children, December 28 is a day clothed with the horror of lives cut off, death visiting those who had lived so short a time and so deserved to be protected and cherished.

Over the years, my own celebration of this feast day has come to be quite dear to me. While God can take my rage, my questions, my anger, my lack of understanding of His ways any day of the year (and often does), it heartens me that there is a day in the Church calendar where the whole assembly of believers is encouraged to cry out the anguished question: WHY?

On this day, I set aside time to let those questions and aches in my heart have full-throated voice. I weep and cry out WHY, LORD? in the company of the great cloud of witnesses who also weep for those holy innocents who died so long ago. I let my mourning be deep and angry and real this day—as I can any day with God—because He is big enough, powerful enough, and, most importantly, good and loving enough to hold receive these questions hurled at him from me. It is a time for me to mourn and wail for those things unmourned this year—or unmourned in my soul in general—or to continue mourning those things if necessary. It is an acknowledgement both that God can take it, and that His ways are mysteriously larger than mine.

Consider spending some time on December 28 to hold these truths of God’s story and your own together before Him.

Prayer for the Feast of the Holy Innocents:

O God, whom the Holy Innocents confessed and proclaimed on this day, not by speaking but by dying, grant, we pray, that the faith in You which we confess with our lips may also speak through our manner of life. Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an Angel, may by his Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of his Resurrection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.