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HAPPY LADY'S DAY
I can’t remember when I stopped making New Year’s resolutions. When I did make them, they would usually revolve around curbing appetite. I could never keep them.
By contrast, at other times of the year, most notably in the spring or summer, I might readily be stirred to curb an appetite or two—finding it easy to cut calories or eat lighter foods like salads. A resolution to increase walking or running was so much easier—enjoying the fresh outdoors when neither too cold nor too hot. As a walker, I agree with C.S. Lewis’s observation:
Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outside world.
My resolutions might have had greater success of achievement when the New Year was celebrated in the English-speaking world on March 25—on the Feast of the Annunciation (affectionately called Lady Day). It was not until 1752 that England (and her colonies) adopted January 1 as New Year’s Day. Who wants to eat a bowl of lettuce or forgo a glass of cheer by the fire on a grey, cold January day? Lent generally coincides with Spring and the Lenten encouragement to abstinence with the support of Scriptural reference may figure in the equation as well.
Malcolm Guite, whose poems I like to add to this newsletter, observed about himself:
I have to confess that I don’t remember ever enjoying New Years Day. I always have the feeling that I am an unprepared guest, who, instead of finding my house with the bed made up and a roaring fire, discovers me amid the accumulated dross of previous revelry. . . I don’t believe in the great ringing in of the new— I don’t see it happening in the world.
My sentiment precisely. But I hope without grumpiness or despair. I do love the Christian feasts that the New Year ushers in: the Epiphany, the Circumcision and the Holy Name of our Lord, the Baptism of Christ, the Purification or Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas), and some of the great saints’ days: Hilary of Poitiers, Antony of Egypt, the Confession of St. Peter the Apostle, the Conversion of St. Paul, Sebastian, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas and wonderful early Church martyrs at Rome like Silvester, Hyginus, Fabian, Agatha, and Priscilla. They are each and all together a celebration of a truly new life and a new era inaugurated by Christ:
. . . Who for love of our fallen race didst most wonderfully and humbly choose to be made man, as never to be unmade more; and to take our nature, as never more to lay it off; so that we might be born again by the Spirit and restored in the image of God.
May God bless us this Epiphany season, and always.
Douglas Dupree
| | Three Counsels for a New Year | | |
First, celebrate and have fun.
Second, acknowledge your mistakes of the past year (or century, or millennium), repent them and ask forgiveness.
And third, look to the future and ask some questions:
“How do we preach the Gospel and celebrate Christ in a way that makes sense to 21st-century men and women?
How do we foster the justice and peace of God’s kingdom? Will we learn to live in peace with justice, or will we take our conflicts to the stars?”
And further, what will we bequeath to our children? “Will future generations bless us for establishing the foundations of prosperity and peace, or will they curse our selfishness and greed for causing environmental disasters and a new tribalism?”
“As Christians we are called to prepare the way of the Lord, but as sinners we place stumbling blocks in the way of God’s kingdom. One way or the other, Christ will come.”
The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, S.J.
sometime Editor in Chief, America magazine
| | Interview with Delores Beaman | | |
Delores Beaman,
Area Director for Young Life Northwest Jacksonville
Delores, please tell us a bit about yourself—where you were raised, your education, and your church background.
DB: I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. My father was a pastor and evangelist, and from an early age I watched him share his faith boldly with people everywhere we went. Many of those conversations led people to come hear him preach, and I was often right there beside him. I believe that’s where my deep love for people was first cultivated.
I earned my bachelor’s degree in psychology and Christian Counseling and later a master’s degree in education, both from Liberty University.
I currently attend Bethel Church in downtown Jacksonville, where Bishop Rudolph McKissick is my pastor. I serve as the Youth Pastor and am also part of the leadership team, working closely with our First Lady to help lead and support the women of our church.
How did you get involved in Young Life as a leader and eventually as Area Director for Young Life Northwest Jacksonville? What influenced your decision to choose this work, and do you view it as a calling?
DB: I have worked with youth and teens since I was 18 years old, and from early on I knew I was called to ministry—I just didn’t yet know how or where that calling would take shape. I spent many years in corporate America, but everything shifted after going on multiple mission trips to Africa. By the fourth trip, I knew it was time to leave corporate life and pursue something more meaningful. I transitioned into the school system as a teacher, where I discovered how much I loved teaching—especially teaching God’s Word. Teaching has always been a part of my life. At just 10 years old, I taught my two younger brothers to read, and soon neighborhood children were coming to learn as well.
While teaching, I met Sarah, who introduced me to Young Life. The very first time I ministered to teen moms through Young Life, I was hooked. I knew immediately this was the ministry I was meant to be part of. A few months after volunteering, the Area Director position became available, and I applied. For the first time, I felt fully aligned with the calling God had placed on my life—to be in full-time ministry.
Young Life gives me the opportunity every day to reach students and train adult volunteers for the Kingdom. My educational background allows me to counsel both teens and adults who feel lost, while my Master’s degree in Education equips me to develop curriculum and programs that strengthen our ministry.
How can readers support or contribute to your work?
DB: Absolutely. Supporters can give directly to Young Life Northwest Jacksonville at: giving.younglife.org/NorthwestJacksonville
CLICK HERE to continue reading the interview.
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Sarah Mullally (Forward). Dancing to the Heartbeat of God: Stories of Discipleship: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2026: Foreword by Sarah Mullally Paperback – February 17, 2026.
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Rhidian Brook. Notes on an Execution: Lenten Reflections on the Last Days of Jesus Paperback – January 13, 2026.
A moving final reflection explores what Easter means for us today, with thoughtful questions for personal meditation or group discussion.
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Stephen Cottrell. Godforsaken: The Cross - the greatest hope of all Hardcover – November 14, 2023
"In the Gospel of Mark's account of the Passion narrative, Jesus calls out from the cross 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which is the Aramaic for 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' - the first line of Psalm 22. It's an anguished expression - traditionally ascribed to King David - of defeat, failure, abandonment, and despair.
This series of reflections, written for Lent and Holy Week 2023 by the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, ponders the significance of these words. What does it mean for Jesus to have quoted them, at the very end of his life? What do those words mean for us?"
— Amazon review.
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Liz Dodd. Easter in Disguise: The 2026 Bloomsbury Lent Book Paperback – February 17, 2026.
"Lent is Easter in disguise, a radical, subversive season of resistance. A blend of contemporary spirituality, scriptural reflection and tales from one of the UK's youngest nuns make this a vibrant take on an ancient season. . . Learn from Jesus the spiritualities that he passed onto his disciples, including solidarity, poverty, hospitality, peace-making, and protest." — Amazon review
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Forward Movement. The Disciple's Way: Daily Reflections for Lent Paperback – September 5, 2024.
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Guli Francis-Dehqani. Cries for a Lost Homeland: Reflections on Jesus' Sayings from the Cross Paperback – August 25, 2021.
"Guli Francis-Dehqani was born in Isfahan, Iran, to a family who were part of the tiny Anglican Church established by 19th century missionaries. Her father, a Muslim convert, became the first indigenous Persian bishop. As the Islamic Revolution of 1979 swept across the country, church properties were raided, confiscated, or closed down. Guli's father was briefly imprisoned before surviving an attack on his life, which injured his wife. Soon after, whilst he was out of the country for meetings, Guli's 24-year-old brother, Bahram, a university teacher in Tehran, was murdered."
— Amazon review.
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Paula Gooder, Samuel Wells. The Print of the Nails: The Church Times Holy Week and Easter Collection Paperback – February 14, 2022.
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Padraig O Tuama, Pat Bennett. What Were You Arguing about Along the Way?: Gospel Reflections for Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter Paperback – November 30, 2021.
From the designer and author of the Spirituality of Conflict website. Created by Pádraig Ó Tuama five years ago, the Spirituality of Conflict website is one of the most exciting and vibrant online lectionary resources. For each Sunday there is an extended reflection, a prayer, and questions for lectio divina or group discussion.
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Joshua Rey. A Season of Silence: Deep Listening in a Noisy World Paperback – August 19, 2025.
"This isn't just about quieting external noise—it's about fostering an inner stillness that continues to resonate throughout your daily activities, bringing clarity, peace, and a profound sense of presence."
— Amazon review.
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Carys Walsh. Dappled Beauty: Through Lent with Gerard Manley Hopkins Paperback – October 29, 2025.
"For heaven's sake BUY Dappled Beauty before Lent in 2026. It is a marvelous and wonderful book on the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Carys Walsh really knows and understands the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I have loved GM Hopkins for many years, and Carys Walsh has considerably added to my comprehension of Fr Hopkins's output." — a happy reviewer.
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Calling Yankees to Florida:
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Forgotten Tourist Articles
Paperback, 2019
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that told of the evils of slavery in a very moving and human way. Her novel swiftly outsold every book published except the Bible. It sold 3,000 copies on the day it was published and 10,000 by the first week’s end and 300,000 by the end of the year.
Following the Civil War (1861-1865), Stowe made her first visit to Florida in 1867. For the next seventeen winters she lived along the St. Johns River in Mandarin and during that time she wrote over fifty wonderful articles about the beauty of her environment and the challenges and rewards of making a living and establishing community in what had been frontier Florida. With her articles, Stowe was one of the original promoters of tourism and modern-day immigration to the state.
In 1873, Stowe published Palmetto Leaves, a collection of essays that reflect her experience and thoughts on the landscape, culture and society of her corner of north Florida. Two Florida historians, John T. Foster and Sarah Whitmer Foster, have edited and published a goodly number of similar articles Stowe wrote not included in Palmetto Leaves. Their book is Calling Yankees to Florida: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Forgotten Tourist Articles, paperback, 2019. It follows and builds on their earlier Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida (Florida History and Culture series), 1999. The consistent argument in both books is that the birth of tourism in Florida did not begin with the railroad barons of the 1880s, as popularly promoted, but with the abolitionist writers, like Stowe, in the Reconstruction era, following the Civil War.
Before Palmetto-Leaves: A Sermon from Florida
Here I would like to highlight one of Stowe’s essays in Calling Yankees to Florida. The essay was published originally in The Christian Union May 21, 1870, titled ‘Amateur Missionaries for Florida.’ The article illustrates Stowe’s deep spiritual roots and her commitment to promoting the Gospel in the developing communities of 19th century Florida. While a teenager, Stowe was inclined toward the ministry. Denied the pulpit because of her gender, she instead pursued her objectives through writing.
In 1829 she wrote, “I was made for a preacher—indeed in a certain sense it is as much my vocation to preach on paper as it is that of my brothers to preach via voice.”
In this article Stowe makes a clarion call to ministers and missionary-minded Northerners to bring the Christian gospel to the new settlements and communities of Florida. It is a rally call that I couldn’t help read except in the light of what we today might be wrestling with in our own soul and conscience as we embark on a New Year. In the words of Thomas J. Reese, quoted earlier in the front of this Newsletter, “How do we preach the Gospel and celebrate Christ in a way that makes sense to 21st-century men and women?”
Stowe paints a vivid, contrasting picture throughout the article of the comfortableness of established religion in New England and the hunger for God’s word on the banks of the St. Johns River:
In New England, preaching is a luxury, and a man who retires from it, feels that there are enough to do work without him, and he can scarcely get a pulpit to preach in if he wants to preach. People in New England are over- preached to. They are like overfed children. The gospel must be got up as cake and ice cream, to tempt a palled appetite. Here [in north Florida] the gospel is as bread to the perishing.
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The Episcopal Church of our Saviour, Mandarin, organized in 1880, after 12 years of the congregation meeting for Bible Readings led by Professor Calvin E. Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The framework for the sermon essay is to consider the unlikely success of preaching and spreading the Gospel in the Jewish and Gentile world of St. Paul with the challenges for mission minded Christians in post-Civil War Florida.
Stowe asks her readers to consider how was the gospel first made to prevail? In the first century, “It was one of the most improbable, unlikely things to prevail that was ever heard of.”
We are so accustomed to looking at the gospel as it is now in all its respectability, and all of the pump of rank and wealth, when churches are splendid and crowded, when well dress people are seen, bowing, like grain in the wheat fields, at the name of Jesus, that it will take a stretch of imagination to carry us back to the real situation as it was in the beginning.
But back she takes us until we see and feel the seeming smallness of the missionary Paul as over-against the greatness of Rome:
People talk of modern skepticism! What was the skepticism that Paul encountered, and how did he overcome it? Who thought of believing in Jesus, when Paul came to the great, rich, gorgeous city of Rome, and what was he, one poor man, with his old, worn cloak, and his bare hands, against the great, wise, cultivated, Roman empire? But he said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ – it is the power of God and the wisdom of God to everyone that believeth it.
Paul met unbelief with belief – and Christ Church must face modern unbelief with belief. Either what we profess is true, or it is not true. If it is true, let us act as if it were.
Persuasive as it is, this essay from Calling Yankees to Florida is not all hard-sell evangelism or call to mission. It is also, in its way, full of sweet reminiscences of the faith already rooted along the banks of the St. Johns River and of humble funerals, solemn and reverent Good Friday observances and beautiful outdoor celebrations of Easter Day.
In closing, one aspect of Stowe’s reflections on contemporary life in the light of the Gospel (or the need for the Gospel light) may strike home with us almost 150 years later—the sheer materialism governing so much of life in this land of wealth:
Multitudes are daily flocking to Florida to make money. They will abandon all the conveniences of civilized life and plunge into the wilderness and brave the danger of acclimating fever, the loneliness of a new settlement, all that they may raise oranges, sugarcane, and grapes, and make money. MONEY is a reality, it seems. Is CHRIST a reality? Is Heaven a reality? And is there anybody that will come and invest in Florida for the sake of winning souls to Christ?
Every interest of this state is going ahead – except its religious interest. The Sabbath is trodden under foot. The steamboats are rushing up and down the river on that day, perhaps carrying loads of Christian professors. Every grocery is a rum shop, and yet these people are worth saving.
Is there anyone who will come here as Paul went to the Thessalonians, and say to the people: “So being affectionately, desirous of you, we were willing to have imported to you not the Gospel of God, only, but also our own souls, because ye were dear unto us…"
| | In the spirit of the Semi-quincentennial of the United States July 4, 2026: | | |
Ron Chernow. Washington: A Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner) Paperback – September 27, 2011.
“Until recently, I’d never believed that there could be such a thing as a truly gripping biography of George Washington... Well, I was wrong. I can’t recommend it highly enough—as history, as epic, and, not least, as entertainment.” —Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker
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William Hogeland. Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776 (Simon & Schuster America Collection) Paperback – July 5, 2011.
"In Declaration William Hogeland brings to vibrant life both the day-to-day excitement and the profound importance of those nine fast-paced weeks essential to the American founding yet little known today. He depicts the strange-bedfellow alliance the Adamses formed with scruffy Philadelphia outsiders and elegant Virginia planters to demand liberty. He paints intimate portraits of key figures..." — Amazon review
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Louis P. Masur. A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship Hardcover – July 1, 2025.
"Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on horseback. This 'northern journey' came at a moment of tension for the new nation, one in whose founding these Virginians and political allies had played key roles."
— Amazon review
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Xavier F. Salomon and seven others. To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum Hardcover – October 21, 2025.
This is an absolutely gorgeous book that accompanied the recent exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York and is currently at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Katherine Bissett has the book in stock in the Cathedral Bookstore.
This illuminating and richly illustrated volume celebrates the Custodia di Terra Sancta (Custody of the Holy Land), its history, its legacy, and its precious treasures.
The Custodia di Terra Sancta is a branch of the Franciscan order, established by the pope in 1342 to safeguard the church of the Holy Sepulcher and other holy sites in the Middle East. Today, Custodia oversees eighty-two such religious sites and, in order to house its remarkable collection, is building the Terra Sancta Museum which is scheduled to staged opening in Jerusalem later in 2026.
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Keeping North Florida Wild Paperback—2026.
This beautiful book celebrates 25 years of the work of the North Florida Land Trust in protecting the irreplaceable landscapes and wildlife habitations of north Florida.
Not available from Amazon. In stock at the Cathedral Bookstore and to purchase online from the office of the North Florida Land Trust.
| | The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity | | |
FOR THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH
Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed
for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one:
Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and
obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit,
that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your
Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in
the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an ecumenical Christian observance coordinated by the World Council of Churches and its member churches and also by the Roman Catholic Church. It was founded in 1908 as the Octave of Christian Unity.
It falls between the Feast of the Confession of St. Peter (January 18) and the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (January 25).
The above Collect for the Unity of the Church, from The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, was written by Archbishop William Temple (1881-1944). It is based on John 17.20-21:
I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
| | From St. John's Cathedral, Jacksonville | | | | |
