Christmas Message | Teacher as Transformer

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Christmas Spirit Each Day

Posted on January 14, 2025 by ivonprefontaine

Theologian and civil rights activist, Howard Thurman shared the following poem in a sermon reminding me Christmas is not a one day event. It is part of the daily ceremony and ritual I should undertake. It reminds me some usurp Christmas as a neo-liberal, market agenda that changes a deeply spiritual event into profiteering.

“Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of mind,
Where the old person sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN;
In you, in me, in all humankind.”

Jesus and his family were humble refugees from humble backgrounds. Regardless of material wealth, we each come from and return to humble backgrounds. In between, I can seek deliverance, age with grace, and retain a daily Christmas spirit. Without it, hearts harden, minds ossify, fear is a constant companion, and there is a lack courage (in French, coeur is part of the etymology of courage) to act and speak out against those who treat humans as chattel dealt with as objects. With a daily Christmas spirit, I engage in I-Thou relationships, without judging, qualifying, objectifying the other. Martin Buber proposed “the key to creating society that is nourishing, empowering and healing for everyone lies in how we relate to one another.”

It takes considerable effort to overcome the divisiveness we currently live with and listen, with open hearts, to others who share views of the world different than ours. In On the Brink of Everything, Parker Palmer describes how he felt anger towards others who voted differently than he did. By the time the book was published, he described how it was important to understand that people did so because they felt left behind in various ways.

Here is Healing Time by gospel and blues singer Ruthie Foster, which seems appropriate in today’s day and age. How do we heal and make whole?

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Tourtière – French Canadian Meat Pie

Posted on December 22, 2023 by ivonprefontaine

I mentioned the tourtière we eat at Christmas. Kathy makes it with store-bought pie crusts, which works well.Tourtière uses various ground meats. Over the years, we had ground beef, pork, turkey, and people who hunt would use ground wild meat. Depending on the year, Kathy will add gravy to the ground meat to bake in the pie. It depends on what we have in the fridge and you could use broth. If a person uses lean meat, it moistens it. This year we will add gravy from our Thanksgiving turkey over the pie after it is made. The other unique feature to tourtière is it is often made with mashed potatoes mixed in with the meat, usually with various vegetables that have been simmered in a broth. We eat a lot of sweet potatoes so that is another alternative to mix in.

The original tourtière was made with ground veal, which is quite expensive. When my mémère (grandmother) and pépère (grandfather) moved to Alberta to homestead 100+ years ago, they modified the recipe to use what was available and least expensive. The latter included shipping meat that got a higher price. They would have used wild meat when they could.

½ lb ground lean beef

½ lb ground pork

1 lb meat total per pie

1/3 c chopped onion

¼ c water

1 tsp salt or to taste

¼ tsp pepper or to taste

1/3 c chopped celery

2 pie crusts – make your own or purchase ready-made

Brown meat and vegetables, add salt, pepper, additional spices if desired.

Cool mixture as you don’t want to melt the fats in the pie crust.

Pour meat mixture into pie crust, cover with 2^nd pie crust, seal edges, make slits for steam to escape.

Bake in hot oven (425F) 20-25 minutes until browned.

Baked tourtière can be frozen and reheated before serving.

Alternate ingredients: other cooked vegetables such as chopped carrots, green peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes. Some like to add gravy so pie is more moist.

I want to leave you with the following message from Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s Advent Sermon “The Coming of Jesus into our Midst.” It reminds me of the Christmas message.

…we are faced with the shocking reality:
Jesus stands at the door and knocks, in complete reality.
He asks you for help in the form of a beggar,
in the form of a ruined human being in torn clothing.
He confronts you in every person that you meet.
Christ walks on the earth as your neighbour as long as there are people. He walks on the earth as the one through whom
God calls you, speaks to you and makes his demands.
That is the greatest seriousness and the greatest blessedness of the Advent message. Christ stands at the door. Will you keep the door locked or open it to him?

For those who have followed my blog for a while, you might be aware I am big John Prine fan. We saw him in concert and I have many of his songs on my I-Pod. Yes, I still use an I-Pod. This is his song Christmas in Prison.