Gifts from the Cottage 🎄🎁
Give a gift of surprising faith, realistic and informed hope, and generous love
As we move toward 2024, we are surrounded by bad news — the terrible events in Israel and Gaza, growing authoritarian movements around the world, the environmental consequences of climate change, deepening anger and invective in politics, the purposeful undermining of rights and freedoms, and worry about the upcoming elections in the United States.
We are amid, as Madeleine L’Engle wrote in her Christmas poem below, “the darkest hour.”
In this hard and bleak time, The Cottage is committed to being a light on the way. We are travelers pursuing the deep beauty and wisdom of faith — in the scriptures, through history, and in the world around us. We trust that God’s love and justice are here, among us and with us. We are questing for meaningful ways to be in community, to practice a generative faith, and to reimagine the heart of Christianity.
The Cottage doesn’t call us away from the world and its darkness. Instead, we seek a more mature vision of faith to sustain us in even the darkest hours.
In 2024, you can depend on this newsletter and the community here to be with you on this journey. In this place, you’ll find inspiration to go deeper and see wider. We’ll continue creatively re-reading the Bible and exploring the news from angles not offered by secular outlets, and we’ll keep saying the things that far too many churches are unwilling to say.
This Christmas, you can give The Cottage as a gift of surprising faith, realistic and informed hope, and generous love.
We’re going together into whatever happens next.
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GIVE A GIFT OF SOUTHERN LIGHTS
The Southern Lights Conference in January on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, is co-hosted by me and Brian McLaren. This year, we’ve invited some remarkable guests to share their wisdom for reimagining faith beyond patriarchy and hierarchy. What would it look like to live in a different kind of community? We want to strengthen your sense of hope and enlarge your vision of what is possible.
Southern Lights isn’t just for The Cottage, but many Cottage subscribers attend this yearly gathering.
Give yourself or a friend a gift card for IN-PERSON or VIRTUAL.
Virtual guests don’t have to attend in real time. A virtual admission ticket gives them access to the livestream and/or the recordings for several months.
Click the icon below for information — and follow the directions from there!
It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss –
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.
It was a time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight –
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.
And in a time like this
How celebrate his birth
When all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
— Madeleine L’Engle, “Into the Darkest Hour”
A song for the season — based on the story of the Wise Men — to strengthen you as we face these days. “Take Us Home by Another Way” by Christopher Grundy.
Give us strength to walk
Show us dreams of a better day
and we’ll pave the way with justice.
going home by another way.
Thank you for sharing yet another of Madeleine L'Engle's poems along with Christopher Grundy's song, "Take Us Home by Another Way". I deeply appreciate your perspectives, wisdom and encouragement shared via The Cottage.
Thanks so much for helping us be the light. As a student of Stoic philosophy I know that circumstances are what they are not good or bad. It is up to us, our consciousness, to make them good or bad. With God all is posible (I think Luke 1:37) so let's keep united.