“This life is sort of like a test for the next, preparation. How we live here matters.” That was my mother’s answer to a question, which I don’t recall as well as her response, that I asked her almost 6 decades ago. It must have had to do with the meaning of life. What else does a nine-year-old ask his parents? After all too much time and theological education, I like her answer, yet I am still pondering what we can do that prepares us for eternal life.

Wedding photographers have an amazing task. They document both actions and feelings of a day in which multiple people with multiple tasks move around one another simultaneously with a single goal in mind. “I do”, say the happy couple. Click. Or, click, click, click, click, click, click. Click. Careful planning surely attends the planning of the photographer’s task list, as the images that every future bride and groom have seen in a movie’s happy ending or a bridal magazine are catalogued and sequenced.

Some neighborhoods are extraordinary at Christmas. Inside and out, homes and hearths mark the days leading up to Christmas. Some neighbors have more holiday light ambitions than the Home Owners Association ever anticipated. I embrace (and defend) the gaudier side of Christmas. I am (mostly) convinced that the incarnation of the Christ in great humility plausibly implies that we may welcome the use of plastic and tinsel in our preparations to celebrate the Feast of His birth.

This Sunday, the third of Advent, is called “Gaudete” Sunday. It’s the Latin word from the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible, for the opening of the reading from Philippians, Rejoice: And as we light the third Advent candle we pray:

It’s always dangerous to share a New Year’s resolution, and to share one before the new year has officially begun is even more so. Nonetheless, this Sunday, which we designate as Christ the King, is the last Sunday in the church year, and the next is the beginning of Advent, the first Sunday of the new liturgical year. Risking all, in light Jesus’ kingship and the move of Advent toward the Incarnation, here’s my resolution and invitation. I want to be a Kingsman. And I want to invite each of you to be a Kingsman or Kingswoman as well. I’ll explain.

This 24th Sunday after Pentecost brings to us readings that exalt values attributed to the biblical understanding of a widow. I got quite fascinated by a comparative reading of the selected texts that allude to the word "widow". I asked myself, "What if we all could be widows in the eyes of our God, who is the author and owner of all possessions!"

Charles M. Irish 7/13/29 - 10/12/15 "My dad, whose life you all have come here tonight to celebrate, and in some way must have touched your lives, was just an ordinary guy. Like you and me. And he would say that if he was here. He just pushed ahead with whatever God gave him or put in front of him. He was bold like that." Sounded to me a bit like bold Bartimaeus in Sunday's gospel reading. “I want to see!”

I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Annie. Of course I love Annie. Who wouldn’t love her frizzy-red hair, shining eyes, and her sunny optimism in the face of her life’s cruel disappointments? Even a hardened millionaire and the President of the United States joined her for the moving anthem, “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” There was not a dry eye in the Oval Office. There is one problem, Annie: you’re fictional. And your advice doesn’t always hold.

Have you ever made a jigsaw puzzle? When you first start out, you’re wondering how in the world all of these pieces will fit together to look like the picture on the box. And be honest, don’t you secretly worry until you place the last piece that one might be missing, that somehow someone left out the last piece or someone lost it? As you come down to the finale placements, you’re trying to visualize just how the last ones fit together, to see if the picture before you will actually match the one advertised. Do you find yourself distracted as your attention drifts from the task at hand? Maybe a piece doesn’t fit just as you thought it would, or a piece that you were sure would fit in the corner suddenly proves to be vital for another area of the puzzle.

Seems to me, we somehow think the box, which is quite real, i.e. the one with only X number of breaths for any of us, is really real, will last forever, but another part of us, somewhere deep down, knows it won’t. Yet we paint it, decorate it, treat it, as if it will, with our cheers or tears for ourselves, others, and the world. And well we should on the one hand, but there is the other hand.