My best Christmases have been those with good Advents beginning with making time with our Savior a priority. It’s not the kind of time that gets checked off a list but the kind where we are infused with love and peace — the true spirit of Advent. This season is a time to set aside […]
Meditation and Questions for Reflection or Group Discussion Mass Readings: 1st Reading Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 2nd Reading: Colossians 3:12-21 Responsorial: Psalm 128:1-5 Gospel: Luke 2:41-52 The Holy Family, Our Model of Faith and Trust and Love and Unity He went down with them … and was obedient to them. (Luke 2:51) Today is not a […]
The Passion of the Christ was the most intense movie I’ve ever seen. But there was a moment of comic relief, a flashback to a young Jesus in the back yard, building a new invention. It was the kind of table that is now a commonplace. But in a society where people reclined to dine, […]
Meditation and Questions for Reflection or Group Discussion (Sirach 3:2-7,12-14; Psalm 128:1-5; Colossians 3:12-21; Luke 2:22-40) Becoming Holy Faith-Filled Families, Reflecting God’s Love to One Another My son, take care of your father. (Sirach 3:12) Have you heard of the “sandwich generation?” It doesn’t have to do with food; it’s the situation many adults find […]
Pope Francis reflected on the meaning of fatherhood during his weekly General Audience held on the Feast of St. Joseph—the Foster Father of the Lord. The Pope asked all the ‘daddies’ in the crowd estimated at 60,000 to raise their hands and then he shared his special wish for fathers and their children: “Be for […]
Every year right after Christmas, we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family. There is an important reason for this. It’s easy to think the “incarnation” means God took on a human body, that he appeared in human flesh. But there is much more to it than that. In Jesus, God unites himself to an […]
The home of Nazareth is the school where we begin to understand the life of Jesus—the school of the Gospel (CCC No. 533). My parents married in 1969. The day before the wedding my father got cold feet. In the hotel bar he sat drinking beer with the lawyer Tom Wall who counseled my father […]
Which woman has the perfect body? Unquestionably, it’s the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is “the masterpiece of embodied creaturely existence,” according to Donald Calloway’s The Virgin Mary and the Theology of the Body. This idea is logical, but it sounds strange to us. What most people mean when they talk about a perfect body is […]
Mary and Joseph’s marriage didn’t exactly get off to an easy start. They were engaged and Joseph had promised not to “defile” Mary, because she was a consecrated virgin. He was really only marrying her because, in that day and age, there was no security in being a single woman. And then she turned up […]
This is the time of year when Christians are most focused on the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Reflection on the Holy Family is more than just the Nativity scene. Naturally, Christmas focuses on the birth of the Saviour, and Mary and Joseph play key roles in this most important event. But, there […]
