Advent
Advent begins on Sunday. If you haven’t yet got your Advent stuff together you’d better nip over to Proost toot suite and nab a few calendars and resources. They have Beyond’s amazing Advent Beach Hut Calendar (I already have mine hanging on the kitchen wall).If you buy it today you’ll have it in time for Advent.
I usually put some kind of kids activity out by the Christmas tree for my Christmas day service. It’s unrealistic to expect kids to focus on a service on Christmas morning. One year I had Dave Walker’s nativity pictures to colour, last year it was origami angels. When they’ve finished we get the pictures, angels or whatever, up on the corner of the altar as part of the worship offering. This year I think we will have Si Smith’s cut-out-and-make nativity figures, again from the Proost site.
Advent i’s bigger than Christmas if you are a University Chaplain – it’s when we celebrate “College Christmas” – a big service and then a week of events (concerts, parties etc) until the teaching term comes to an end. I’m off to print service sheets and put up a tree now. With a little help from my friends…
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author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
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