Daily Meditations and Prayers for the Christmas Advent Fast and Epiphany
recommended by Fr. Alexander Veronis on 11/28/2005

This small but valuable book provides inspiring thoughts for one’s daily devotional reading during the Christmas and Epiphany seasons (November 15 to January 7).

Each day’s two page reflection contains:

  1. a listing of the daily saints commemorated
  2. recommended daily Scripture Readings
  3. a relevant excerpt from a liturgical service
  4. a hymn or prayer about the Mother of God
  5. a Scripture verse for memory
  6. a meditation for the day
The meditations by Fr. Coniaris are, as always, brief and perceptive. Here is an example of one for November 27 entitled, “Why Did He Come?”:
“There are some people who find it hard to believe in the miracles of Jesus. They say, ‘How can one believe that Jesus walked on water, or fed the five thousand or was born of a virgin, or raised the dead and was Himself raised from the dead? How can one believe all this?’

“Yet, the real difficulty does not all lie with the miracles. It lies in the Christmas message of the Incarnation. The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was and is God made man, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, fully human and fully divine. If Jesus was the same Person as the Eternal Word, through Whom the world was created, then it is not strange at all that He walked on water, and was born of a virgin, and raised the dead. If He was truly the Son of God, it would be more strange and startling if He should die and not rise again! God’s coming to us at Christmas is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it is a mystery that makes sense of every thing else that the New Testament contains. For He who was born was not another Socrates or Plato or Einstein, but the Eternal Son of God. If you begin by denying that Jesus is the Son of God, then you will have a problem with all of the miracles.”