We’ve spent four weeks anticipating this day, maybe a little longer if you are younger, or less if you’ve been busy at work or otherwise. Maybe you’ve got the sleigh before the reindeer, so to speak, by putting up all the celebratory symbols in advance of the actual event, but I’m sure you’ve held off […]
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I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that people who live in the Southern Hemisphere celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer. For me Christmas is so deeply linked with snow, fires, darkness outside, that I just find it impossible to get my head around Christmas with hot sunny days, and a barbecue on the
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Hail Mary, Blessed Virgin, Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, … We have many, many titles for Mary. One list I found has 50! That might be more than we need and today we are focused on one – Mary, Mother of God. On this Sunday after Christmas we would usually be celebrating the Feast
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Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. This Feast lies at the transition from our Christmas season, focused on the Nativity, to the rest of our Liturgical year, based around the adult life of Jesus. The baptism of Jesus obviously links to the grown man – it occurs as Jesus is about
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Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. Which is a little confusing since you might remember there are supposed to be twelve days of Christmas, the last being the Epiphany on January 6. But in some parts of the world, including the US, the feast gets moved to the nearest Sunday. Since many people
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… his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been worried to death looking for you.” (Lk 2:48)A pretty typical interchange with a teenage son. It continues as you might expect: he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you realize …?”And they
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Christmas has arrived, our celebration of the Nativity of the Lord. But this Christmas is disrupted, by illness, by fear, by divisions between people which seem irreconcilable. And yet this is the season of “peace and goodwill to all”. Really? Maybe we ourselves are fortunate to be able to celebrate with family and friends, but
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Today, with the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, the final feast of the Christmas season, we transition from our celebration of Christmas and our focus on the childhood of Jesus to his adult life. Appropriately our gospel reading is from the start of Mark’s Gospel. Mark doesn’t include anything before this time –
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For Isaiah Jerusalem was the center of the world, God’s world. That was where the camels would bring the gift-bearers with their gold and frankincense. Matthew uses the same image to place the infant Jesus at the center of God’s world. It’s no longer a place that matters, it is a person. The Feast of
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We celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family immediately after Christmas. This seems entirely natural to us, but this feast is a very recent innovation! It was only introduced in 1921, and moved to its current position in the calendar in 1969. A recognition of the importance of the family, at least as we understand
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