Reflections for December 2025

Feast of the Holy Family

December 28, 2025

The Feast of the Holy Family usually leads us into the family – into the Holy Family and into our own families. We think about our relationships with those closest to us, with our parents, our siblings, our children.  Our first reading this week from the Book of Sirach (Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14) takes us in […]

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The Nativity of the Lord

December 25, 2025

Our Christmas story can be approached in so many different ways. There are four different masses given to us on this feast day, each with its own readings. If you were in a monastery you would attend all of them – at midnight, 3am, 6am, and 9am! In one of the readings Isaiah speaks to

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Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 21, 2025

The Christmas story is actually two stories woven together.  The first is a very familiar human story of the birth of a baby. The circumstances are difficult, the parents aren’t married; they are far from home as a result of some bureaucratic process imposed from so far on high that the reason for it is

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Third Sunday of Advent

December 14, 2025

Today we hear the audacity of Isaiah’s prophecy at its most outrageous (Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10). He had no reason to hold out those expectations of joy and splendor, of vindication and healing to people uprooted by war, people in misery far from home, despised by those around them.  That reading is complemented by the ever

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Second Sunday of Advent

December 7, 2025

We listen to Scripture week after week. Why?  We know pretty much what it says. What’s the point of going back over and over the same ground? Sometimes the familiarity may be comforting, sometimes it’s irritating, maybe more often we simple zone out and it washes over us.  Paul this week gives us one good

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