Reflections for Christmas

Baptisms are all about beginning. In the Catholic tradition baptism became associated with babies – so a beginning of life in many senses. That was not always so. The earliest accounts of church life are completely focused on adults, and baptism had nothing to do with the start of human life, as in a baby, […]

Today, the Feast of the Epiphany, marks the end of our Christmas season, the end of the beginning, as it were. The key to this ending is the message that the birth of Christ, the decisive entry of God into our world, into our human state, was not just a deeply human story of a

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

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

The four gospel writers introduce their accounts of God coming to be with us as a human being in four completely different ways. If you knew nothing of this story and picked up each of the gospels individually, you could easily think they were totally different stories – at least to start with.  The place

Just a week ago we were remembering and celebrating how Jesus was a part of a very ordinary human family, the smallest unit of human society. Only a week later we find ourselves having to recognize that Jesus was from the very beginning a player in the world of geopolitics and international relations (Matthew 2:1-12). 

Jesus was God, born as a human being. But that means more than just he was biologically a human, that he had human DNA. He was fully human – he was part of human society, part of a human family. For Matthew the key aspect of Jesus being human was that he had a place

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus – well, duh! The moment in human history when God decisively participates in our life, becomes “one of us”, when God becomes flesh, becomes incarnate. On such a major feast we are spoilt for choice of readings. You could go to four different masses on Christmas.

Today we finish our celebration of Christmas with the Feast of the Epiphany. We started with the comfort and closeness of Mary and Elizabeth, we have hopefully spent time with family and friends, focused on those nearest to us. But that is not where Christmas ends. The ending has us looking outwards, to the wide

The image we may have from the nativity stories of the Holy Family may feel comfortably familiar to us. An isolated couple with a single child in a strange place, with just a few friendly strangers around them. Countless Christmas card images underpin this view of what could be a very modern nuclear family, at