A Delightful Christmas Book for All Ages

From The True Meaning of Christmas by Santa Claus with Mitch Finley:

Listen to Christmas Music

During the Christmas season, the air is filled with Christmas music. Everywhere you go, in the stores and in the streets, you hear Christmas music of all kinds. Sometimes the Christmas music may seem loud and frantic, which does not add to the true spirit of Christmas. Instead, it creates a feeling of holiday chaos and uproar. Bang, bang, bang? Do not allow that to be your only Christmas music. Make sure to listen to some good Christmas music sometime during the Christmas season.
Whether you are a child or a grown-up, if you can, attend a live performance of Handel's Messiah; that would be good. Sit there and soak in Handel's music. If you look around, you may find me there, as well. Let the music warm you from the inside out. If you cannot attend a live performance, listen to a good recording.
Would you like to know a secret? One of my all-time favorite recordings of Christmas music is by a group that was popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, called the Kingston Trio. This album is titled The Last Month of the Year and it is, for me, always beautiful, entertaining, and uplifting. Sometimes I listen to it through earphones on my portable music player as I fly through the night skies. If you look, you may find this Kingston Trio collection yourself. Of course, there are many other beautiful recordings of Christmas music.
Remember: Christmas music should not just be background music. Instead, make time to sit down and really listen to the music. Listen, really listen. Let Christmas music fill your heart and help you to feel more deeply the true spirit of Christmas.

If you would like to learn more about this book, or purchase a copy, click here: The True Meaning of Christmas

An Amazing Story for the Month of All Souls' Day

From Whispers of God's Love: Touching the Lives of Loved Ones After Death, by Mitch Finley:

Frederick Buechner Receives a "Visit" From an Old Friend

Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and bestselling author, reported his experience in a talk he gave in 1987, sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which appeared later in Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, edited by William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Buechner told his audience that a good friend had died one year ago, and a couple of months later he and his wife stayed overnight with the man's widow. That night, he dreamed that his friend stood there in the guest room "looking very much the way he always did in the navy blue jersey and white slacks that he often wore . . ."
Frederick Buechner told his friend how much they missed him and how happy he was to see him, and his friend acknowledged this. "Then I said, ‘Are you really there, Dudley?' I meant was he there in fact and truth, or was I merely dreaming that he was? His answer was that he was really there. And then I said, ‘Can you prove it?' ‘Of course,' he said. Then he plucked a strand of blue wool out of his jersey and tossed it to me, and I caught it between my index finger and my thumb, and the feel of it was so palpable and so real that it woke me up. That's all there was to the dream."
It seemed, Buechner said, as if his friend came to do what he did, and then he left. The next morning at breakfast, Buechner described his dream, and he had barely finished when his wife spoke. She declared that she had seen a strand of blue wool on the guest room carpet that morning as she was getting dressed, and "she was sure it hadn't been there the night before."
Buechner wondered if he was losing his mind. "I rushed upstairs to see," he told his audience, "and there it was--a little tangle of navy blue wool that I have in my wallet as I stand here today."

To learn more about this book or to purchase a copy click here: Whispers of God's Love

A Family Prayer for Autumn

From Amen! Prayers for Families With Children by Kathleen Finley:

On a Fall Day

God of all the colors of the rainbow,
thank you for this amazing fall day
when the leaves are bright with hues
that will soon fade as winter comes near.
You made these leaves for us to enjoy,
to give us shade in summer
and now to see in a whole new way
as they begin to fall and die.
Their dying now will make room
for new life next spring,
just as when we die to the selfishness inside
we make more room for your new life in us.
You made each one of us
as different as each of these leaves,
each very special to you.
Help us to see your love in many ways all around us
and to enjoy this colorful time of year.

Amen!

"Very truly, I tell you, 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


To learn more about this book or to purchase a copy, click here: Amen!

Deepen Your Understanding of What Faith Is by Considering What Faith is Not

Excerpt from What Faith is Not by Mitch Finley:

When we say that faith is not a security blanket, the metaphor of the security blanket is an image of a faith that you can turn to anytime for a feeling of well-being. All you need to do is grab your faith and pop a thumb in your mouth to make things right with the world. But if this is how you relate to your faith then your faith is bound to disappoint you. If, when life gets scary, you turn to your faith like Linus turns to his blanket, sooner or later you will discover that your faith will slip right through your fingers and be gone. Sooner or later life, like Snoopy, will snatch your security blanket faith away from you, and because it is a weak kind of faith it will be gone in the blink of an eye. Zip! Gone, just like Snoopy is gone with Linus' blanket. Of course, you may try to hang on to your security blanket faith, but if you do you can expect to find yourself airborne and going for a wild ride, and before long your security blanket faith will slip from your grasp and be gone, with you lying on the ground wondering what the heck happened there.
A security blanket faith is phony because it is a "faith" that depends upon a woefully inadequate image of God. It reduces God to the role of an emergency rescue technician. If my faith is a security blanket, that means that it is God's role to rescue me from bad times, suffering, grief, and the consequences of my own stupid mistakes and idiotic choices. It also means that never will my faith require me to take any risks or accept suffering for the sake of some greater good.

Order a copy of this book, or learn more about it...Here.

Eucharistic Meanings For an Adult Faith

An excerpt from The Joy of Being Catholic by Mitch Finley:

There seems to be considerable misunderstanding of the eucharist among Catholics in our time. To say that the eucharistic bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ is not a mere analogy or metaphor. The Catechism of the Catholic Church could not be more clear: “At the heart of the eucharistic celebration are the bread and wine that, by the word of Christ and the invocation of the Holy Spirit, become Christ’s Body and Blood. . . . The signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding, the Body and Blood of Christ. . .” (No. 1333).

This is the ancient faith of the church, the faith of the followers of Christ since the earliest days of the Christian community. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, which scholars date to about A.D. 54, St. Paul reminds his readers: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” (10:16).

We should not be too hard on Catholics who do not believe that the eucharistic bread and wine become the actual “body and blood, soul and divinity” of Christ. Perhaps not only they, but all of us, are not as well informed about the eucharist as we could be. Perhaps Catholics who do not accept the conventional description of the eucharist simply want to be honest, and the conventional formula no longer “works” for them. Perhaps those of us who do accept the conventional formula about the bread and wine becoming the “body and blood” of Christ sometimes wonder what this actually means. As eucharistic ministers, it is especially important for us to seek as complete and accurate an understanding of the eucharist as we can.

It is possible that by simply repeating the phrase “body and blood” over and over, insisting that this is what the bread and wine become, we have lost touch with the deeper truth of the eucharist. Like all religious language, “body and blood of Christ” is an attempt to put into human words a mystery the human intellect can never fully grasp. Perhaps it will be helpful if we take two steps back, look at what we are talking about, and see if we can spark some new life in the old words.

Gradually, we may find ourselves faced with a Great Mystery, and appropriately so. It is important to understand that “body and blood” is a Semitic phrase that means “the whole person.” When we say that the bread and wine of the Mass become the “body and blood” of Christ, we say that the bread and wine become the “whole person” of Christ. Catholicism insists that following the consecration the whole person of Christ is present in both the bread and the wine. Only a sacramental simple-mindedness will view the bread as Christ’s body, the wine as his blood, and never the twain shall meet.

This is why for many generations Catholics received Communion only in the form of bread while the priest alone drank from the chalice. This is why, even today, in certain instances a person may receive Communion only from the cup--someone whose illness prevents him or her from swallowing a consecrated host, for example. Also, it is still not unusual for many Catholics to receive only the host at Communion, even when the consecrated wine is available. In both cases, though receiving only the bread, or only the wine, the person really and truly receives the “whole person” of Christ--”body and blood, soul and divinity”--in Communion.

Perhaps those who say they do not believe that the bread and wine become the “body and blood” of Christ are trying to say that they no longer find meaning in the phrase “body and blood.” Perhaps they think they have no choice but to take this phrase literally, in a physical sense that borders on the gruesome. Our era has been so heavily shaped by the human sciences, including psychology, that perhaps the phrase “whole person” will make more sense, and be more acceptable, to more people. If we explain that “body and blood” means “whole person,” perhaps that will help clarify the meaning of the eucharistic presence of Christ.

We need to remind ourselves, as well, that in the eucharist we do not receive the historical, flesh-and-blood Jesus. Continually repeating the “body and blood” phrase, without explanation, may not only mislead some people, it may also reinforce the misconception that the Christ we receive in Communion, in the consecrated bread and wine, is Jesus as he walked the dusty roads of Palestine, or Jesus as he hung on the cross. This simply is not true.

The Christ we receive in the eucharist is, indeed, the one who lived, taught, and died in first-century Palestine. But the Christ we receive in the consecrated bread and wine is much more than that. The Christ we receive is the risen Christ who is with us now, alive and active in the church and in the world. It is the “body and blood, soul and divinity,” the “whole person” of the risen Christ that we receive in Holy Communion.

With this realization we find ourselves smack in the middle of an overwhelmingly profound mystery, an experience of transcendent holiness, a sacred event of awesome dimensions. When we receive Communion, and when we as eucharistic ministers give Communion to others, if we have even an inkling of what we are about, we may be inclined to fall on our faces in wonder and worship.