Gospel, Homily and Coffee

Life is ultimately good and joyful.   Our Faith, as catholics as Christians, is incredibly fulfilling.   There is so much that make sense, and provides meaning. Arriving at this though is not always easy.   It requires a degree of effort on our part (and I daresay, at times a LOT of effort) Yet, when the effort is made: as the shepherds, we go into our lives glorifying and praising God.  Glorifying and praising for the freedom and joy that we have found and experienced. What is that effort? It is in the phrase almost at the center of this gospel passage:  “And Mary kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” Mary “reflects” couple of times in Luke’s Gospel:  she ponders the angel’s greeting, and when Jesus runs away from them to be in the Temple, after the resolution of that family drama, the gospel says she treasured all these things in her heart. Socrates says, through Plato:  “An unexamined life is not wort...

(Last night I spoke of salvation, and our Salvation is that God has embraced our humanity.  That embrace changes us;  it allows the strong parts of ourselves to be used to love others; the weak parts allows us to grow and transformed so that we can be loved and love others.) This all requires humility. Humility is to accept my place, and our place, in the Universe. This may come as a shock to some, I know it gets me all the time; I am not the Master of the Universe, and nobody is.  I am but a servant, creature; all of us are but servants and creatures. I have been made.  You have been made.  We have been made by God. Yet we are made for something wonderful and spectacular.  God made us to be part of a great harmony,  a harmony within this universe and beyond it.   My humanity, my uniqueness, our humanity and uniqueness, all of it serves the great purpose;  God’s great plan. It is like a choir;  a single voice is be...

Salvation is the freedom and the capacity to live life fully. And as Jesus revealed, and thus we believe as Catholics, living life in the full is about loving others and letting ourselves be loved. Salvation is to love and let ourselves be loved.   God’s will is that we love and be loved by one another. For this, the Son of God was born and lived as Human, died and was resurrected. So that we humans would be freed for love Remember Love, as Jesus revealed is to willingly give of ourselves for the good of others and to let others give of themselves willingly for our good. This is the joy of Christianity. What we especially celebrate these days at Christmas is not simply that the Son of God was born as human, but think of it in this way:  That God embraced humanity!  The Incarnation is The Divine fully and wholly embracing our humanity. Jesus embraced all of our humanity; the good and the not so good. This is powerful stuff.  Because...