Thanksgiving at Christmas

First anniversary message to readers

One year and one week ago I began this Substack experiment, Desiring a Better Country. I haven’t posted much since the autumn term began, due to the urgent task of writing new lectures for students, but with the long essay to be posted shortly after Christmas DBC will reach something very near the 100,000 word mark, not counting an older essay or two re-posted from other sites.

Not many will have read them all, of course, but to those of you who have read most of them I say a sincere ‘thank you’ for your time and for thinking what I have written worth your time. If indeed it was, I am grateful to God for making it possible, and pray that what he knows to be mistaken will not have interfered too much with what is not; and that, in the year to come, the distinction will be clearer to me as well.

To one and all I wish a very happy Christmas. I am looking forward to the midnight mass, which has a different collect, but will share here the collect from the vigil:

O God, Who dost gladden us by the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that we, who now joyfully receive Thine only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, may also without fear behold Him coming as our Judge; even the same Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son: Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.

And this pair of Rubens paintings, the second looking forward a little, though not quite that far. There’s Light in the darkness.

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