On December 21, 1844 Hans Christian Andersen published the “Little Fir Tree,” a rather depressing story of an evergreen tree that is never satisfied. As a young sapling he looks up at his full grown comrades and dreams of one day being as large as they. The sun and air and forest are beautiful but he takes no joy from them. When he grows older he hears a bird tell about the trees that are cut down in the fall and decorated by the people in the nearby village. The tree is very excited to think that he will one day be a Christmas tree too and once again ignores the blessings of his current state. When he has reached a good size, he is chopped down and taken to a nearby home where he is decorated and celebrated. Though he loves this moment of glory, he is still convinced that there will be more and that his situation will only get better. He has a rather rude awakening when Christmas is over and he is stored in the attic eventually to be chopped up for firewood. He recognizes too late that his happiest moments in life were those that he did not appreciate in the moment. It may not be the most chipper of Christmas stories but the story of this Christmas tree got me thinking about how I look at the Christmas season.

Christmas is all about anticipation. From the moment Thanksgiving dinner is over, it is nothing but Christmas. Stores and radio stations may start right after Halloween but that is because they have no concept of the proper order of things. But now is not the time for that tirade. Continue reading Make It Last All Year →

Planning for the future is an important part of life. My decisions today affect my day tomorrow, so I better look ahead to make sure I do what I need to. But by creating a plan for tomorrow, I also create an image of what I can expect tomorrow to look like. I create an expectation. My expectations may be based off past experience or from what I’ve heard or may be completely made up. No matter where they came from, my expectations trick me into thinking that I have control over the future and that is what makes them so dangerous.

Planning for the future is necessary for me to reach my goals to the best of my ability but what use do expectations serve in my life? What good is a predisposition that is based on information totally separate from the situations I look forward to? When I expect an event, I am deciding how I will react before having a chance to experience it. Not only does this take away from the experience itself but takes away some level of freedom in my reaction. If I have decided to be bored, I’m going to be a little bored even if the event is more fun than I expected. Continue reading What Do You Expect? →

Editor’s Note: New Christian Woman is happy to welcome Tykah Echols to our management team. We’ve partnered with the Religion Department at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church to create an internship for young women. Tykah, now a freshman, started writing for us on a volunteer basis in high school and we are excited to have her step into this far more involved role of intern. On top of writing articles, she will be managing the Facebook page, helping with promotion, updating and managing the back-end of the blog, and who knows what else.

For this week’s article, We’ve asked Tykah to give us her impression of how her peers are relating to the New Christianity.

It would seem that my destiny is to marry a minister. I come from a long line of minister’s daughters who married a minister and based on the track record of my five older sisters it doesn’t look like our generation is going to be the one to end that streak. Out of the six of us girls, the four who are married are married to ministers while my two brothers pursued other forms of use than the clergy. It would seem that this religious gene is passed through the female line. So now it falls to myself and my other unmarried sister. Continue reading Introducing Our Intern →

Grimm’s original fairy tales are infamous for their gruesome details and harsh lessons. Baking witches, hungry wolves and homicidal violence that seems to belong in a Quentin Tarantino movie highlight the brother’s collection of German folktales. But it should be remembered that these tales were not originally transcribed so that little girls could fantasize about their happily ever after, or for little boys to imagine slaying a great dragon. These stories were really tales of warning for adults. These cautionary naratives against folly, adultery, and cruelty, set in a world of extremes paint images that make their advice plain. What is less obvious to the eye is the internal message that lies beyond the details on the surface. Using Emanuel Swedenborg’s science of correspondences, a spiritual lesson can be uncovered. Spiritual stories that work in their own way to offer more cautionary advice. These stories date back long before the brothers Grimm and the fact that their lessons (if not their details) still live on today speaks to their universal truths and meaningful morals both literal and spiritual. Continue reading Beauty For Ashes →