Christmas Alphabet : M for Mark Knopfler, Keb Mo & Thomas Merton

It wasn’t the Kings, with their glittering gifts, who were the first witnesses.
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No.
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It was the Shepherds.
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Outcasts of the time.
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Who yet had eyes to see and revere a Miracle before them.
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Looking for the Spirit of Christmas?
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I wouldn’t go looking in the shopping cathedrals.
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You might be better off if you realise there might be no truer Christmas gift than a toothpick, a Luckie and a coffee refill.
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Ragpickers have Dreams.
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Hop a freight with them and sing out if you see the flashlight.

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Music in the Winter sure carries at Night.

Sure carries at Night.

Especially when Mark Knopfler plays guitar.

Or when Keb Mo lays down a you just can’t deny it or resist it groove.

His tale here will be only too familiar to many.

 

Christmas can be a time for reflection and contemplation of our individual and collective moral landscapes.

The writer and Monk Thomas Merton had a gift for illuminating those landscapes.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.

But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room.

His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated.

With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.

He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.”

From Raids on the Unspeakable.

 

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