Whenever Mother Teresa would hear someone describe the order she founded as a community of “activists,” she would immediately correct them. She and the other members of the Missionaries of Charity were, she insisted,  “contemplatives.” She would point out that whenever new persons joined her community they were required to spend weeks reading the Gospels and contemplating the Host, so that they might be able to recognize Jesus when they go out onto the streets to look for him  “in His dreadful disguise among the poorest of the poor.”

When my family moved from Atlanta to Columbia three years ago, we could identify only one thing lost in the move. Baby Jesus.

     He was the centerpiece, obviously, of a hand-carved, olive wood crèche. Given to us by a friend after a trip to Israel and Palestine, the pieces came carefully wrapped in an Arabic newspaper. Although my husband and I each brought our own manger scenes into our marriage, this exquisitely beautiful one from the Holy Land quickly assumed the prominent place on the living room mantel.

Churches large and small are good and ready for Advent this year.

They began, like the Gospel story itself, with a nativity scene. John Mack Walker carved wood along the way the Gospel story went, through scenes and stories in the life of Christ, until finally there were sixty carvings.