Illustrated Prayers for Advent, Christmas, & Epiphany
The season of Christmas is, for so many of us, a crazy-busy, head-spinning, noise-making, exhausting affair.
We're supposed to feel peace on earth but our days and nights are anything but peaceful.
Every heart is expected "to prepare Him room" but, like the Bethlehem Inn of Luke 2:7, there's no room in our hearts for Jesus to make a leisurely visit, crowded as they are with worries over things that we can rarely control.
We sing about silent nights but we find ourselves tumbling from one commitment to another and our head space is anything but “all is calm.”
We confess belief in angels and virgin births and strange magi from the east but our sermons invariably find ways to domesticate the fantastical aspects of the nativity stories and thus to rob us of an encounter with the truly terrifying nature of the Incarnation.
We tell the children in our communities that baby Jesus "no crying he makes" but these same children face anxieties that they struggle to articulate and fear to make public.
We're told to "repeat the sounding joy" three times but what we really feel is depressed and frustrated by all sorts of strained family dynamics that never seem to improve—the "special Christmas services" notwithstanding.
We extol the simplicity of the manger but find ourselves drowning in a torrent of messages that tell us to do more and to be more, because our happiness presumably lies in the exact opposite of what Mary and Joseph possessed at the hour of Christ's birth.
So what do we do?
One thing we do, perhaps, is to resist the story that the "market" keeps telling us and to read, as if for the first time, the story that Matthew and Luke tell and to discover in this re-reading something far more life-giving than we ever imagined possible.
That's what Phaedra and I have attempted to do in this new set of illustrated prayer cards, “The Light Has Come.” Our hope is to provide people with practical helps to make the seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany more meaningful in some fashion. Less crazy busy.
Each of the 25, 4 x 6 Prayer Cards includes an original watercolor illustration on one side, created by Phaedra, and on the other: a bible verse, a short prayer, and a unique activity. (Our friend Shaun Fox did the fabulous design work on the cards.)
The collection includes familiar themes, such as Faith and Hope, Joy and Peace, Shepherds and Angels, but also less familiar ones, like Feasting and Sorrow, Fear and Doubt, the Fantastical and the Mundane, Anna and Simeon, The Magnificat and the Refugee Family. There are also cards for Saint Nicholas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and Epiphany.
Our hope is that this box of cards will invite you to stop, look and listen afresh to the nativity narratives and to discover a story that truly heals and restores this very broken and beloved world of ours.
The cards are now available for presale at The Rabbit Room store. Do check them out. We really need any and everybody’s help to get the word out about this collection and we appreciate any help you might be able to offer us on this account.
It would make Phaedra and me awfully happy to know that we had aided at least one person, one family, or one community, to experience the deeply good and life-giving story of Christ's coming in this often-harried and hurried season of the year.
