Journey to the Manger With St. Patrick & Friends: A Six-Week Celtic Advent Devotional

A SIX-WEEK Advent devotional guide. Is your journey to Christmas usually filled with thoughts of wishing you could skip right past the season? Does your pace of life become so fast that you feel you are spinning out of control? Would you like to find a more peace-filled path on which you can journey this year? Then this is the book for you. We will begin our journey on November 11th and walk the ancient path of the early Celtic Christians. Traveling in the company of Saints, sinners and storytellers, you will be invited to embrace a new, yet old, approach to Advent. Together we will recover the map they followed and find the treasure they found: the treasure of Emmanuel - God with us. From Gordon MacDonald's Foreword: "Should you choose to follow Jean through the Advent weeks, lighting candles as you go along, you'll find a set of uplifting and deepening reflections for every day. They are not burdensome or time-consuming. Each reading is designed to help us center our thoughts upon the true thrust of Advent. In this book there are rousing Celtic prayers: I bind unto myself the name, The strong name of the Trinity, By invocation of the same, The Three in One and One in Three . . . . There are wonderful stories: "I was five years old," Jean writes, "and Christmas was coming." You can't imagine what comes next as Jean reminisces on the generosity of God as understood through the eyes of a child. There are old hymns: "Will your anchor hold in the storms of life, when the clouds unfold their wings of strife. . .." Great Psalms . . . encouraging promises . . . poems from the heart of the great mothers and fathers of the Christian movement. In giving us this spiritual guide for Advent, Jean Hess has provided us a wonderful gift. I am among those who are truly grateful."

Jean McLachlan Hess is a native of Glasgow, Scotland. A graduate of Glasgow University, she received a Doctor of Ministry from Denver Seminary. Ordained by the Church of Scotland, she has ministered nationally and internationally. She and her husband Rick currently pastor a Celtic Christian church in Denver, called 316. Jean’s two sons and daughter are all married and she has seven grandchildren.