Dear Friend of Episcopal Charities,

Many have traditionally called her “Mother of God,” but the ancient church gave her the title, “More Spacious than the Heavens.” Galaxies gathered into the folds of an ordinary woman’s veil. Light older than the earth resting against a woman’s body.

In this image, we see that God does not remain far off, light-years away. God consents to be carried in the womb of a woman. Notice her hands. One rests over her heart. The other curves beneath the child she has not yet met. Receiving and offering – the shape of a faithful life.

And when she finally opened her mouth to sing, she did not sing a lullaby. She sang that the hungry would be filled with good things and the lowly lifted up. Mary’s song is not sentimental. It is a song about a new world according to her faith, sung by a young woman with nothing but her body and her yes to offer back to God.

Across the Diocese of Chicago, that song is sung every year in the work of Episcopal Charities.

This year, through your generosity, Episcopal Charities granted $380,000 to seventeen nonprofit partners and $50,000 to eleven Episcopal parishes working to prevent violence, advance equity, care for creation, and end hunger. 

Through Project P.E.W.S., we walked alongside newly arrived Caribbean and African neighbors, whom almost no one else was counting. 

Through our partnership with Eco DioChicago, six parishes performed Level II Energy Audits, helping them understand how their church spaces use energy and take steps to become better stewards of God’s creation.

Through our Inner Capacity Building Program, we tended to the character development and spiritual growth of the leaders who carry it all.

Advent is a season of waiting, but it is not idle waiting. It is the waiting of Mary, more spacious than the heavens, who was preparing for her child to be born.