Reflections

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, but everything to do with the start of a spiritual life.  The idea of baptism, at its simplest a ceremony of washing, didn’t start with Christianity. It was already well established in Jewish tradition, which was why…

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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 baby and his parents, but an event recognized by the whole world – even as far away as its mysterious end, somewhere in the east.  As so often with our biblical stories there are multiple levels to…

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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 that direction. The focus on honor and authority doesn’t perhaps sit so well with the spirit of our modern times – family relationships aren’t the same now as they were 100 years ago, let alone 2,500 years.…

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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 a people returning to scenes of devastation (Isaiah 52:7-10). At this Christmas, like very other, this is the experience of so many caught in the middle of war and violence. But devastation may also be what we…

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