Category Archives: Holy Days

December 3, 2025 · 9:38 am

Advent is “New” Each Year

“Advent reenacts a past event as if it was new each year.” – Diana Butler Bass, A Beautiful Year

There is a familiarness to this Advent time of year. We use familiar decorations, assume familiar routines and find ourselves among familiar people. We attend the usual services, programs and parties. We observe the well known traditions of our upbringing or adulthood. We revisit things from past years by memory or physical reunion.

“This is the day of the Christmas program.” “The yuletide dinner happens on the 12th.” “There’s a gift exchange with staff on the 21st.” It’s a time to reflect, to retell the story, and to make pilgrimage.

But, for all that is familiar, there is room for something new. Afterall, you are not exactly who or where you were last year, or any year prior. There are new factors in your life – new situations and circumstances too. Maybe you are in a new relationship, with a new friend or new grandchild. Maybe you are newly retired, newly unemployed or employed, have newly moved, or find yourself newly energized or challenged.

Life is never static. It’s organic, always changing and growing and evolving. The very composition of your body continues to change as old cells die off and new ones emerge and grow. Your mind is renewed by your thoughts and dreams, by what you read and what you hear and reflect on. Your spirit is refreshed by your devotion, prayer and worship life.

The annual invitation to the Advent season of preparation and waiting is to lean into the new, even as you revisit the familiar. Retell and listen again to the stories of Advent as you encounter the Scriptual themes. But do so in light of what’s new or fresh in you. Listen with a new focus. Allow your new situation to be the lens through which you encounter the familiar once again.

Anticipate Jesus’ coming again. Yet ask, “what’s new in this anticipation” for me? What is it that you are to pay attention? What does this Advent have for you to learn – about yourself, your faith, your relationships, your God? Might you be being asked to pay attention in a new way during this season that feels so familiar but can be so new?

© Daniel M. Cash 2025

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November 25, 2025 · 1:05 pm

A Thanksgiving Exam

There is an ancient practice found in the history of the Church called “The Examination of Conscience” or “The Examen”.  I learned about this practice years ago and have found it to be a helpful exercise. Today I taught about it in my Introduction to Christianity class, as an example of a practice of faith that helps us in the Christ way of living.  I’m not sure how it connected with my group of 18–22-year-olds, but maybe it landed with a few of them.

Revisiting this ancient practice, during this Thanksgiving season, gave me pause to consider its merits for the practice of thanksgiving. Here’s how an adapted version of the practice that I call “Stop, Look and Listen” might work for you:

Stop: Stop what you are doing, find a comfortable place to sit with both feet on the floor and your body relaxed (no arms or legs crossed) with palms open.  Breathe – pay attention to your breath, “let go” of any stress, worries or mental squirrels you are apt to chase. Just stop!

Look: Look back over the past year.  Ask yourself: “What is there to be thankful for?”  Make a mental list or perhaps write down your list.  What are you grateful for?  How has God blessed your life in the past twelve months?

Offer those thanksgivings to God in prayer – this can be naming the list itself, or just mentally revisiting what you’ve listed.  No need for fancy language.

Now, looking back, ask yourself: What am I not grateful for? What do I need to repent of, let go of, seek forgiveness for, or say ‘I’m sorry’ about, and to whom? 

Once you’ve made that list – take action.  Bring these things before the Lord or resolve when and how to address them with the people whom you’ve identified.  Let go!  Release these hindrances to thankful living.

Listen: Be still.  Sit in silence. Try for at least five minutes – longer if you dare. Light a candle as a focal point for your listening.  Use a mantra to focus your mind: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”.  Or read over a favorite scripture.

Listen. Allow God to speak and read your mind, your person. Just be still and know that God is God.

Don’t rush this part of the exercise.  It’s ok to feel a bit uncomfortable. Just be still!

When you are ready, recite the Lord’s Prayer or Psalm 23, blow out your candle (if you lit one) and move into the remainder of your day or season with thanksgiving.   Amen.

© Daniel M. Cash 2025

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September 15, 2025 · 5:39 pm

Halt the Summer Postmortem!

The end of summer’s lifespan has been once again vastly overstated.  Do not write her obituary just yet.  As we move into this third full week of September, and the meteorological end of the summer season is in full view, she has arisen!

We can feel the brush of her high 80’s hot air and bask in the bake of her high noon sun. Sure, the color of the palate has changed – highlighting browns and yellows now, but where sprinklers sputter the grass is yet bright green and growing.

Hummers and Monarchs may be preparing for migration, and who can say about the geese of Canada?  Most of them are now year-round pests. Sunflowers are still blooming, as are zinnias; and sedums are coming into their own.  This can be true even as the coneflower and black-eyed-Susan have gone the way of the day lily and iris.

A bike ride in the countryside shows soybean fields more yellow than green, and some even a crisp brown. The exception being the second crop group that grows green yet – shadowing out it’s wheat stubble bed.  

Some of the early corn has already been picked. Birds flutter out of otherwise drying corn fields, brown from the bottom up, as I ride past. They seem to say, “leave me be while I catch a late summer nap.”

The sun will set a fraction of time earlier this evening, and the rise just a tad later come morn.  We may awaken to temps in the 50’s, but they will be short-lived, climbing higher by the hour, like summer herself who has made a comeback.

It’s a last week, maybe two, in which to remember vacation days, holidays, pool and beach days, or fishing at the pond.  It’s a “Minnesota goodbye” summer offers – first from the front room, then the foyer, out the door and onto the porch, and finally from the drive.  “Come again” we say, “when you can stay longer next time.”
© Daniel M. Cash 2025

#bikeridephotography #backyardphotography

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July 6, 2025 · 4:33 pm

This Land

This land, emblematic of her multitudinous and flawed inhabitants
Consists of varied features with their own perplexing presentations.

Vast arid plains which alternate from winter’s frigid to summer’s sultry grip.
Mountain ranges of different heights and temperaments.
Great Lakes with deeply cavernous plummets.
Rushing rivers that carry away precipitation toward
Oceans of endless water, wind and strength.

From the swamps of Florida and the bayou,
To the wheatfields of the Palouse and breadbasket that is the Midwest,
America is a geography diversified.

Like the people who have populated her, migrating from various other places.
These people, taking over that which was not theirs, have often
Convinced themselves they can reject others who were here first, or those who would follow later.

The curvature and evolution of this land is ever changing
Like a great dune that is wind swept this way then that.
From Kitty Hawk and the Outer Banks to the shores of Lake Michigan and the
Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
This, but one example of change the land both knows, endures and welcomes.

Consider too, though on a longer timeline, the change of canyons and landscapes
Where rivers have been ceaselessly carving, time standing as witness.
Or animal species who once roamed in mass, only to face near extinction,
Sometimes reintroduced. Change and the land have gone hand in hand.

A reminder, during what is a fragile period, that this land oft withstood when it seemed she might not. Withstood weather, economic challenge, civil war, political division and corrupt leaders.
Withstood to stand another day, waiting in hope as for a new dawn.

Far from perfect yet persevering, the homeland seeks to host those who know it and those who would.
An oasis, but sometimes a desert, she can be fickle.
She calls for fortitude from those who would prove up homesteads and speak for justice.

Dream? Yes, dream.  To be a place where children of all skin color, language and creed stand hand in hand to voice a song, pray a prayer, or learn a lesson.
Dream? Yes, dream. To be a place that favors not just those who measure wealth by mammon, but those who know richness comes in many denominations.
Dream? Yes, dream.  Be a dreamer just like those who first came to these shores, and
Those who still yearn to here dwell and be free.    

Dream, and then sing, taking up the prayerful lyrics of ancestors to not give up on the: 

“Land where (our) fathers died” but “from every mountain side”
Let freedom ring!
“No more shall tryants here with haughty steps appear”
But “let mortal tongues awake” and “let all that breathe partake”
“Long may our land be bright, with freedom’s holy light.
Protect us by Thy might, Great God, our king.”

© Daniel M. Cash 2025

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April 23, 2025 · 10:58 am

Living Between the Kingdom and Empire

As Christ followers, fresh from the “Alleluias” of Easter’s joy, resume daily routines, will the refueling of Resurrection Day and it’s news be proven to have emboldened us to live as the proverbial “Easter people”? Or will the gravity and bleakness of empire infiltrate our lives and overtake that joyous message? These are the questions I’m thinking about personally as a contemporary disciple of Jesus facing the age-old tension of living between the Kingdom of God and empire of today.

To state it another way, how can the residual effects of full Church sanctuaries, inspiring sermons and the uplifting music of Easter inject us with a booster shot that propels us to live something closer to the “Kingdom of God” than the anxiety and despair of today’s broken imperial system? Perhaps it’s too much to ask, but then again, maybe not.

The Resurrection bespeaks a triumphal death defeating Messiah who calls us into the fullness of abundant and everlasting life. This is life in God’s Kingdom where the reign and rule of the living Jesus is welcomed and celebrated – Christ is Risen!

In this Kingdom living we set aside the restraints and perilous news of the world, in favor of the ways of the living King Jesus. We are released from the magnet pull of overbearing messages via social media and traditional media outlets. Released to spend time with kindred siblings in Christ and focus on the ways of Christ himself. In this release we feel and affirm the defining identity of our “in Christ-ness” that both calls us apart and sends us forth.

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