Merry Christmas!

If you are joining us today for the first time, or if you are returning to church for the first time in a while, or you join us every weekend, welcome home. While you are here I hope you experience the joy and peace you’re searching for this Christmas. On behalf of the entire pastoral and support staff of St. Mary’s Parish I wish all of you and your families a Merry and Blessed Christmas.

Mini reflection: Advent is drawing quickly to a close, and Christmas is coming soon. The change is upon us. Do we rise to accept it, or do we fall on our faces in fear?

The First Transfiguration

I imagine Joseph waking up the morning after the dream, blinking in the dim half-light of the dawn.

Dear Friends,

As the book of Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a time for everything. It also reminds us that there is good news, and God is involved in all of it, the events, the changes and the transitions of life. I’m writing to you this weekend to inform you that our Music Director, Terry Kerr has decided to retire from ministry. His retirement will be effective, at the end of the Christmas Season.

There are certain phrases that serve as a kind of shibboleth for millennials, a dog whistle that only ears formed between 1981 and 1996 can discern. “You can’t sit with us!” is one of those phrases.

It’s from the movie Mean Girls, (which, I hear from my younger family members, has now become cool with the kids again, so maybe my point about it being niche is incorrect). The character Regina George, merciless ruler of the cool kids, is rejected from the ultra-exclusive lunch table she herself formed when her minions, tired of her cruelty, serve her the most devastating words a teenager can hear in public: “You can’t sit with us.”

During my baseball career, my best coach often said, “You shouldn’t be worried if I yell at you. Be worried if I don’t. If I stop pushing you, it means I don’t think you have any more potential.” He demanded a lot, and I knew it meant he saw that I could be something special on the baseball field.

Jesus says some demanding words to us this week. “ Do you think I have come to establish peace on the earth?” he asks, “No, tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:51).

It’s 9:08am on a Saturday morning, and I am too darn busy for confession.

I’ve probably written before about how hard I find it to get to confession — I say ‘probably’ because I really can’t remember. I whine about it so frequently that it’s hard to tell if I’ve made it the subject of a written piece or if it is simply an oft-recited refrain from the Litany of Colleen’s Perpetual Complaints.

Mini reflection: Whatever is interrupting communication between your heart and the One who crafted it, it can be overcome. There is no door thick enough, no night dark enough, no sleep strong enough. Ask and You Shall Receive.

It’s easy to look at today’s Gospel reading and come away with a view of God as disinterested and irritated, reluctant to give us what we need unless we bang down his door, hound him to the furthest reaches of heaven, wrench him from his reverie and force him to answer just so we’ll finally go away.

Mini reflection: Are you anxious about many things? Then you need to be right where Mary is: at the feet of Jesus, with all your burdens. Martha’s Burdens

It’s time to admit it: I’ve been unfair to Mary in the past. Been a little catty about her. Oooh, Mary, she’s so holy. Well, do you like to eat, Mary? Who made your lunch? Yeah, that’s right: it was Martha. Because you know what? It’s the Marthas who get things done in the world while the Marys lounge around reading Aquinas and attending silent retreats and going to Eucharistic Adoration whenever they want.

It takes a cold, hard, godless heart to step over a wounded man on the street. But in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite didn’t step over the half-dead traveler. I think we picture them doing so, in our collective imagining of this well-known story, but the words of the Gospel are quite clear. “When he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side,” Jesus says of both.

Mini reflection: Too often, life falls short of my expectations — an opportunity didn’t work out, a day didn’t go the way I planned — so I ball up my fists and stomp my feet. And God takes the Book of the Gospels and opens it to Luke, Chapter 10. On Pilgrimage

Before I embarked on my trip to the National Eucharistic Congress last summer with a group from my archdiocese, we had an orientation meeting. At that meeting, the coordinator of the trip shared with us “The Five Rules of Pilgrimage.”