News - December 2019 RSS Feed

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:  Praised be Jesus Christ! In last Sunday’s Gospel, and of course a few days ago on Christmas, the location of prominence for our prayer and reflection was Bethlehem.   This Sunday, on the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, our attention shifts to Egypt, and ultimately to Nazareth. 

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parishes: Praised be Jesus Christ!  I had the opportunity while on my recent sabbatical in late August and September to spend some time hanging around Bethlehem.  What is it like today?  One major feature of contemporary Bethlehem is that in order to get there, both for tourists and also for locals, one has to pass through the Israeli-erected and controlled security wall that allows one to enter what is commonly called “The West Bank,” which is where Bethlehem is.  The wall is large and imposing, and covered with graffiti in many places, especially by residents who are upset by its presence in their neighborhood.  

Advent begins this weekend, and with it a new Liturgical Year.  In the Church’s current lectionary layout, this Sunday we enter anew into the beautiful Gospel narrative according to Saint Matthew.  Today we also enter a new month, that of December.  It is, therefore, a weekend of new beginnings. Perhaps it seems odd to speak of “beginnings” this time of the year. We are so programmed to focus on reference points such as New Year’s, the tax year, the fiscal year, the growing year, the school year, the secular, commercial, non-religious “Christmas Season” (which began somewhere back in October I guess), and dozens of other calendar points.  None of those times begin right now.  Looking around us, not much of anything seems to really “begin” in December these days.  Even winter, which begins now, is not really a beginning as much as it is an ending to the growing cycle of our part of the world.

Another season of Advent is once again upon us, with all of its ancient beauty, mystery, and majesty.  Every year when Advent arrives I try to offer a reminder about what I would consider to be an important, even if unofficial, theme of the season:  the importance of silence.    More and more sectors of the Church these days seem to be commenting about an overall lack of silence in our modern world.  Life has gotten so, so noisy.   What has made this possible is our mechanized era.  Decades ago,  society dove headlong into the frenzy of harvesting whatever benefits that new science could bring us, which included machines, devices, and a broad industrialization of life in general.  We never asked difficult questions about the consequences of such an embrace.   Those things did bring some benefits, but they also brought frenzy, clutter, de-humanization, and a distancing from the natural world.