Waiting. We do a lot of waiting at this time of year. We queue up to buy gifts—and to mail them. We wait for Amazon orders to arrive in the post. We wait in airports, traffic, and coffee shops. We wait for Christmas break to wrest us from our studies, our work, our loneliness. Sometimes we wait at a tremendous pace, as if filling our days with work or parties or consumer pursuits will make

The Role of Creation in our Journey with Christ: Part III There is a running joke that Orthodox Christians do everything in threes, so this will be my last article under this title.  In the past two articles I have been discussing the unique Christian approach to God’s earthly creation as a sacramental reality: that it can be and is in fact designed to be how we encounter intimate communion with God the Creator especially