The Christmas Conundrum

"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine

Always on the lookout for amazing (free) resources for Catholics, I recently came across The Understanding the Scriptures Podcast:
If you understand why this week’s Friday Frivolity is funny, please consider yourself a smartypants…


What makes us human is not our minds but our hearts, not our ability to think, but our ability to love… We must give the heart pride of place as we try to discover and define who we are.
– Henri Nouwen.
Today was the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest scholastic minds in the Church’s history. Despite his intellect, when he studied in Cologne his size and quiet nature earned him the nickname “The Dumb Ox”…
A very quick post today. As I mentioned before, I’m trying to read through the Bible in a year. At the moment in the plan, each day I a section from Genesis, a psalm and a section from Matthew’s Gospel. As I’ve been reading the Psalms, I noticed a curious word occasionally interspersed within the text, “Selah”:
O Lord, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me;
many are saying of me,
there is no help for him in God. Selah
But thou, O Lord, art a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head.
I cry aloud to the Lord,
and he answers me from his holy hill. Selah
I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, for the Lord sustains me.
I am not afraid of ten thousands of people
who have set themselves against me round about. – Psalm 3:1-6
I wasn’t sure what this meant so I did a bit of googling…
It turns out that the exact meaning of “Selah” is somewhat disputed, but Wikipedia suggests that “It is probably either a liturgico-musical mark or an instruction on the reading of the text, something like “stop and listen”. Selah can also be used to indicate that there is to be a musical interlude at that point in the Psalm”
