Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 1:57-66

When the time arrived for Elizabeth to have her child she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy toward her, and they rejoiced with her. When they came on the eighth day to circumcise the child, they were going to call him Zechariah after his father, but his mother said in reply, “No. He will be called John.” But they answered her, “There is no one among your relatives who has this name.” So they made signs, asking his father what he wished him to be called. He asked for a tablet and wrote, “John is his name,” and all were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened, his tongue freed, and he spoke blessing God. Then fear came upon all their neighbors, and all these matters were discussed throughout the hill country of Judea. All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, “What, then, will this child be? For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: God constantly is drawing us to God’s self, calling us out to become the people that God wants us to be. God pulls and God tugs, sending us a thousand messages about where we might go to become most fully who it is that we are. The question that the people ask about John, “What will this child be?” is the question we always can ask about ourselves. No matter our age or condition, we always are being drawn toward something. It is incumbent on us to seek that still small voice within to discover who and what that is.

Saint of the day: Born June 23, 1390, John of Kanty was a Pole. A brilliant student at the University of Cracow, he became a priest and a professor of theology at University of Cracow. Falsely accused and ousted by university rivals, at age 41 he was assigned as parish priest at Olkusz, Bohemia. He took his position seriously; terrified of the responsibility, he did his best. For a long time that wasn’t enough for his parishioners, but in the end, he won their hearts. After several years in his parish, he returned to Cracow and taught Scripture the rest of his life.

John was a serious, humble man, generous to a fault with the poor, sleeping little, eating no meat and little of anything else. He took a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and hoped to be martyred by Turks. He made four pilgrimages to Rome, carrying his luggage on his back. When warned to look after his health, he pointed out that the early desert fathers lived long lives in conditions that had nothing to recommend them but the presence of God.

At the time of his death, John was so well loved that his veneration began immediately. For years, his doctoral gown was worn by graduates receiving advanced degrees at the University of Cracow. He died December 24, 1473 at Cracow, Poland, of natural causes.

Spiritual reading:

Behold the father is his daughter’s son
The bird that built the nest is hatched therein,
The old of years an hour hath not outrun,
Eternal life to live doth now begin.
The Word is dumb, the mirth of heaven doth weep,
Might feeble is, and force doth faintly creep.
(“The Nativity of Christ,” Stanza 1, St. Robert Southwell, S.J.)

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 1:46-56

Mary said:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;
my spirit rejoices in God my savior.
for he has looked upon his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
and has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever.”

Mary remained with Elizabeth about three months and then returned to her home.

Reflection on the gospel reading: Mary comes to her cousin Elizabeth as a young pregnant woman. Her yes to God well may have caused her a loss of face among some members of her community: for instance, Matthew’s gospel tells us that Joseph doubted her. That someone believed her and credited her story, as Elizabeth did in yesterday’s gospel, must have been an immense relief to a very young woman in a difficult situation. The Magnificat reflects her joy that she was understood. It is an experience that all of us have had, that is, relief when someone has understood our situation when other people have not. The Magnificat is an expression of joy at being understood.

There are many lessons we can draw from this gospel passage. When we recognize that someone truly understands us, our joy is best experienced as a sign of God’s presence and expressed as thanksgiving to God. Even more, we always can strive, as Elizabeth did, to understand the circumstances that cause people to do the things they do and give them the benefit of any doubt we have. It is a kind of gift-giving all of us can afford to do.

Saint of the day: Frances Xavier Cabrini was born in 1850 at Sant’ Angelo Lodigiani in Lombardy, Italy. One of thirteen children raised on a farm, she received a convent education and training as a teacher. She tried to become a religious at age 18, but poor health prevented her. A priest asked her to teach at a girl’s school, the House of Providence Orphanage in Cadagono, Italy, which she did for six years. She took religious vows in 1877 and acquitted herself so well at her work that when the orphanage closed in 1880, her bishop asked her to found the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to care for poor children in schools and hospitals. She came to the United States to carry on this mission.

Mother Cabrini and six Sisters arrived in New York in 1889. They worked among immigrants, especially Italians. Mother Cabrini founded 67 institutions, including schools, hospitals, and orphanages in the United States, Europe, and South America. Like many of the people with whom she worked, Mother became a United States citizen during her life, and after her death, she was the first US citizen to be declared a saint. She died December 22, 1917 at Chicago, Illinois, USA of malaria and is interred at the very northern tip of the island of Manhattan at 701 Fort Washington Avenue in New York City.

Spiritual reading: Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. (The Time of No Room by Thomas Merton)

Today we celebrate the family of Jesus.  We hear a lot today about the “family,” especially among conservative churches who even have organizations to make sure that the family models they promote are not diminished or destroyed.  The unfortunate reality is that the highest rate of divorce in the United States comes from some of these fundamentalist groups.

If we believe Luke, Jesus’ family was not the usual model family either. Mary was betrothed to Joseph, a formal ceremony for the Hebrews – much stronger than an engagement is today, but still not allowing the sexual union of the partners which was reserved for marriage – when Mary was found to be pregnant.  This event could have precipitated a break in the betrothal, and in fact, Mary would have been looked upon as a great sinner, worthy of being stoned to death. Luke’s Gospel rather ignores Joseph’s reaction to any of this, and the next we hear of the couple is when they are on their way to Bethlehem.

In between, however, Mary has gone to visit Elizabeth and Zechariah, and with Luke’s great interest in and development of the women of his story, we spend a great deal of time learning about both Elizabeth and Mary’s reaction to the miraculous births. And then we get the beautiful description and story of John the Baptist’s birth, followed by our traditional Christmas story and the birth of Jesus.

So the family we are celebrating today is a mother, father and child – but again not the typical family of the period.  Nor is what happens in today’s Gospel typical either. After Jesus is presented in the temple, 40 days after his birth as required by law, we don’t hear another word about him until he is 12 years old. This is kind of like the jump that was made in Desperate Housewives when the next season skipped 5 years in every characters’ lives. The Temple in Jerusalem is the frame for this 12 year jump. He is presented in the Temple and then in the next scene he is brought to Jerusalem, he runs away and ends up back in the Temple.

And it seems that Jesus at 12 years old is very precocious. He went to the Temple and sat with all the teachers and listened to them and asked questions. When he himself answered questions, the teachers were amazed at his understanding of the Scriptures.  He was just a boy – though a twelve year old would be considered almost an adult – the so called-teen years didn’t exist for that culture.

In any case, even in this Holy Family we find there was anxiety.  That should give hope to those of us who recognize anxiety in our own families or those of us who have deal with a rebellious child. The answer Jesus gives to his mother would appear to our culture to be smart-mouthed as well. Remember, Mary and Joseph had not been able to find him for three days! Three days – words that somewhat foreshadow Jesus’ later disappearance in the tomb!

When my daughter was 14, she was also very precocious. Like many teens, she felt that she was an adult and knew everything.  I was the assistant principal of the Catholic school where she went to school, and when I saw the absentee list for the school and saw her name on it, I got worried because I knew she had headed out to school that morning. I called home and she hadn’t come back.  This led to two full days of not knowing where she was. We got reports that someone had seen her walking toward the river. All sorts of things went through our heads, even though we thought we knew our child and felt we would have known if there had been anything wrong.

The story ended on the third day much like Jesus’ story.  My daughter had jumped on a bus and gone to Toronto, thinking that she was old enough to strike out on her own. Once there, she got frightened and searched for the one person she knew that lived there – the nun that had run her Montessori School, now living in a convent in Toronto.  The good sister took her in and called us to let us know that she was all right. My daughter’s reaction to us was similar to Jesus’: What were you worried about?

If Mary and Joseph were anything like me, I didn’t know which I wanted more – to slap her for what she did, or to hug her because she was okay. Both emotions warred inside me! When the Evangelist says: And Mary “kept all these things in her heart,” I think I understand all too well what is meant by that.  It is still in my heart and I still ponder that event: the overwhelming fear for one’s child, and the overwhelming relief that she is well, frosted with the overwhelming need to get angry with her so she would never do it again.

Like Jesus, my daughter came home and “was obedient” to us – mostly.  And we never had another frightening event like that.  But every time I hear this story of Jesus, I wonder whether their reaction mimicked mine. In many of the commentaries on this reading they suggest to us that Jesus was not rebuking his parents, but telling them that their parental role must come second to God’s will. I don’t think Jesus was much different than my daughter, however, and he was feeling his teenage oats and testing the waters. Jesus may have been God, but he was also human, and I think he had to grow into his self-awareness. This may have been a first step.

The first reading today was chosen not so much because it also concerns a similar Jewish family – Elkanah, Hannah, and Samuel, father, mother, and son – but because it talks about the dedication of a child to God’s will.  In this case, the mother Hannah had prayed for and was given a child. She did not, as Mary did, present the child to the Temple after 40 days, but waited until the child was weaned, brought him to Eli, a priest in the Temple, and left him with Eli to be raised as a child dedicated to the Lord.  This kind of love of God and thankfulness to God seems very wrong to us today.  Can we even imagine a mother bringing her three year old to a convent, and leaving him there for the nun’s to raise, because you wanted to thank God and have the child raised in a religious setting, dedicated to God. We would ask, what kind of mother could leave her child? In our Gospel it was not Mary who made that decision to do the Father’s will, but Jesus himself.  Yet the story of Samuel is almost foretelling what will happen in the New Testament.

Finally, the second reading today, a beautiful description of love and what God has done for love, presents us as God’s family.  We are the children of God. And we are a family because we are loved.  God has sacrificed his Son just as Hannah did hers. And as Mary will eventually do this as well, seeing him on the cross. We have two things we are asked to do: believe in Jesus, the Son of God and love each other. And so we come full circle:  What binds a family together as seen from the readings today is love of God and love of each other. And from my point of view, family is a group that loves each other and God, cares for the needs of each other and respects each other. And that the makeup of a family can take many different forms. What is important is the quality of that relationship and the loving commitment of each of the members.  That is what we need to strive for, and not conformity to unrealistic ideal of what the physical makeup of the family should be.

And that love, care and respect is the challenge of the Good News I bring you today.

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 1:39-45

Mary set out in those days and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: Through a coincidence in the calendar for the Sunday and weekday lectionaries, the gospel reading from yesterday’s Mass is also the reading for today’s Mass. Luke’s description of Mary’s visitation to her cousin Elizabeth follows the text we read on Saturday concerning the annunciation to Zachariah of the coming of his son, John, who would be the forerunner of the Lord. Elizabeth asks the question that goes to the heart of the gospel reading, “How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” How indeed is it that this happens to any of us, that the Lord should come and hunt us down? Yet, indeed, this is exactly what God does in each of our lives: come to find us to bring us to God’s self.

Saint of the day: Born May 8, 1521, Peter Canisius was educated in Cologne, Germany. An excellent student, he received a master’s degree by age 19. He became a Jesuit after attending a retreat conducted by Peter Faber, S.J. A preacher, writer, and teacher, Canisius traveled and worked with Saint Ignatius of Loyola. During prayers, he received a vision of the Sacred Heart, and ever after offered his work to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He led the Counter-Reformation in German lands. His catechism went through 200 editions during his life and was translated into 12 languages. Ordained a priest in 1546, he was the founder of colleges. He addressed the Council of Trent on the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. By the time he left Germany in 1590, the Jesuit order in Germany had evolved from almost nothing into a powerful tool of the Counter Reformation. Canisius spent the last 20 years of his life in Fribourg, Switzerland, where he founded the Jesuit preparatory school, the Collège Saint Michel, that prepared generations of young men for careers and future university studies, and under cantonal administration continues to exist as a coeducational preparatory institution. Canisius died December 21, 1597, that is, 412 years ago today.

Spiritual reading: If you have too much to do, with God’s help you will find time to do it all. (Peter Canisius, S.J.)

We seldom get tired of hearing the Christmas story, and St. Luke is such a good storyteller! Of the two narratives of Christ’s birth, his is the more imaginative and theological. He chooses his details carefully making them memorable, but also reflects on the Old Testament prophecies and places Jesus in the political context of his day.  In Roman times, the Roman Emperor was seen to be a god, and they spoke of him in much the same religious way that Christ was spoken of. Caesar Augustus was to usher in a time of peace, so Luke makes sure that one of the messages we get from the birth narrative is that Jesus will also usher in a time of peace, but a different and more important kind of peace. Luke was not above inventing ‘facts’ for things he did not know.  That was very customary in his time.  So he may not have known the birth place of Jesus, but the Old testament said the savior would come from Bethlehem, so Luke had to find a way to get Mary to Bethlehem to give birth.  Even little details reflect the theology that had developed by the time of Luke.  Jesus was placed in a manger, a trough used to feed animals, but theologically he would be the food for the world through the Eucharist. Isaiah says he will be visited by shepherds, so Luke has the shepherds as the first to hear about the birth of Jesus. This story is now so familiar to us all, but, even if some of the facts of the story are inventive, it is a story that touches all of us each year and warms our hearts.

We do tend to glamorize Christmas though. The stable where Jesus was born seems warm and inviting to us today.  It probably wasn’t.  Imagine a baby being born in a garage behind someone’s home in an alley in downtown DC. That’s probably closer to the truth.  The first visitors were shepherds and we get these cuddly images of the little shepherd boy beating on his drum.  In actuality shepherds were rough and uneducated.  They probably smelled quite bad, too. And we tend to think of Jesus as our Savior, and we romanticize his life in such a way that the human qualities often disappear in our minds. But God sent his Son to a lowly carpenter and his wife, and didn’t come as a mighty warrior but as a helpless child.  Some of you remember Bishop Sheen on television.  He liked to tell this metaphor of Christ’s coming. He asked if anyone loved his dog enough to be willing to become a dog him or herself to save it. Probably not – it even seems absurd to us. Yet God did more than this even.  The distance between God and us is much greater than a pet is to us. An ant might be closer. And yet, God became a man, but as a little helpless child.  He became a human being in order to give us hope and to heal us.  He raises the value of being human by taking on our nature and entering this hard world of ours.

I found this story which might illustrate this point a little better.

Once upon a time, there was a man who looked on Christmas as a fraud, a lot of humbug.  He wasn’t like Dickens’s Scrooge, though, because he was actually a really good person – kind, considerate to his family and just in his dealings with his neighbors and business associates. He just didn’t believe in all the nonsense about God becoming man which all the churches celebrate at Christmas. He didn’t believe in an Incarnation. He was much too honest even to pretend that he did believe in it.

His wife, however, was a believer, and was a churchgoer, and loved Christmas. And so, when she would go off to church with the children to Christmas services, he would apologize for not going with them. “I would feel like a hypocrite,” he said. “But I will stay up and wait for you all to come home.”

So his wife and children left for church just as it began to snow.  He watched them leave and stood looking out the window, watching as the snow fell harder and piled up on the ground. He thought that if there was going to be a Christmas, it was nice that it would be a white one. A little later on, when he was sitting by the fire waiting and reading his newspaper, he heard a strange kind of thudding sound. Then he heard it again. And again. Was someone hitting his house with snowballs, he wondered. So he got up and went to the door. But what he found was that a flock of birds trying to navigate in the storm has flown right into his picture window. They were on the ground, kind of huddling from the cold, and a bit stunned. He felt sorry for them and wondered how he could help them.

Behind his house he had a small lean-to that he stored his outdoor equipment in, and that had once been a shed for a goat that they had. If he opened up the wide door of it, they might go inside and at least find shelter from the snow and wind. He quickly got on his boots and coat and trudged out to the shed. He opened the door and lit the lamp he had there. The birds seemed to barely notice what he had done.

So then he thought I will go and get them some bread crumbs and maybe they will come in for that.  So back he went to the house and tore up some bread and went back to the shed and distributed it, making a trail to the shed.

The birds totally ignored him and continued looking stunned and flopping about in the snow. Maybe they are afraid of me, he thought.  How can I find a way to get them to trust me?  If only I could become a bird for a few moments and lead them to safety!

As he had that thought, the church bells began to toll midnight. He stopped in the snow to listen to the bells and suddenly he knew… it all made sense to him.  He sank to his knees in the snow, looked up to the heavens and addressed his God for the first time in years: “Now I know..Now I understand why you had to do it, and become human for us….” (Story is from Fr. Tommy Lane)

The Incarnation is a great event. You may notice that the priest bows in the Creed when we get to that point – and he “became man”.  This is what we celebrate at Christmas, and despite all the other trappings of Christmas – the gifts, the food, the well-wishing, the cheer – if it hadn’t been for this event – this God, lowering himself to become a helpless child – there would be no Christmas, we wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be saved, we wouldn’t be led from the hard cold winter snow into the warmth of heaven, the shed prepared for us by our Savior.

And this is the Good News that came into the world today. Merry Christmas to you all.

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 1:39-45

Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: This passage from Luke prepares us for the great and solemn commemoration of the Lord’s birth which we shall celebrate in several days. At the very outset of Luke’s gospel, the message that we receive is that Jesus comes not to be served but to serve. Elizabeth does not come to serve the needs of Mary and Jesus: God is with Us comes, and truly it is he, the Lord; but in the womb of his mother, he travels with his mother to serve the needs of Elizabeth.

In this passage, the Baptist stirs in his mother’s womb when he hears the voice of Mary. Babies in their mothers’ wombs, of course, are always twisting and turning. But Elizabeth, herself full of the Spirit and prophetically recognizing who comes to her, interprets the baby’s movement as joy at Mary and Jesus’ arrival.

We know how much our mothers imprint themselves on us. Jesus lives a life of service, going out and looking to be available to those in need. The Baptist lives a life of prophecy, living in the desert and speaking truths at the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Where indeed do you think these men got the things that so profoundly characterized their lives? God works in human ordinariness to bring about great things.

Spiritual reading: The mystery of Christmas therefore lays upon us all a debt and an obligation to the whole created universe. We who have seen the light of Christ are obliged, by the greatness of the grace that has been given us, to make known the presence of the Savior to the ends of the earth. This we will do not only by preaching the glad tidings of His coming, but above all by revealing Him in our lives. Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us. This one day is the day of His birth, but every day of our mortal lives must be His manifestation, His divine Epiphany, in the world which He has created and redeemed. (Seasons of Celebration by Thomas Merton)

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 1:5-25

In the days of Herod, King of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the priestly division of Abijah; his wife was from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both were righteous in the eyes of God, observing all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren and both were advanced in years.

Once when he was serving as priest in his division’s turn before God, according to the practice of the priestly service, he was chosen by lot to enter the sanctuary of the Lord to burn incense. Then, when the whole assembly of the people was praying outside at the hour of the incense offering, the angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right of the altar of incense. Zechariah was troubled by what he saw, and fear came upon him.

But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall name him John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He will drink neither wine nor strong drink. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of fathers toward children and the disobedient to the understanding of the righteous, to prepare a people fit for the Lord.”

Then Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel said to him in reply, “I am Gabriel, who stand before God. I was sent to speak to you and to announce to you this good news. But now you will be speechless and unable to talk until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time.” Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah and were amazed that he stayed so long in the sanctuary. But when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He was gesturing to them but remained mute.

Then, when his days of ministry were completed, he went home. After this time his wife Elizabeth conceived, and she went into seclusion for five months, saying, “So has the Lord done for me at a time when he has seen fit to take away my disgrace before others.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: At its roots, the gospel passage that we read today tells us that God reaches into human history to do wonderful things. God moves in the ordinariness of human events and makes those events extraordinary. When God prepares the way for salvation, God is neither fearful of touching our lives in ways indirect nor in ways direct.

Saint of the day: About 689, an Irish monk named Kilian was martyred at Wurzburg in Germany, where he had been commissioned a roving bishop by Pope Conon. His tomb at Wurzburg became the site of pilgrimages from Ireland and so many Irish pilgrims came over the centuries that in the year 1134 the bishop asked the Irish monks of St. James at Regensburg to establish a hospice there for these pilgrims.

The Irish monks from St. James established a monastery at Wurzburg and St. Macarius was named abbot. Like his predecessors, he was a man of deep learning and a calligrapher of great skill. He inaugurated at Wurzburg a remarkable literary activity and left behind at Wurzburg the largest collections of Irish manuscripts in existence, in the tradition of the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow. The Irish monks were superb calligraphers and illuminators and produced some of the most beautiful manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Long before the invention of printing, they had large libraries and left their mark upon the learning of medieval Europe.

Macarius attracted to Wurzburg learned and talented monks from Ireland, among them David, a historiographer and head of the cathedral school, who became chaplain to the emperor. The influence of these Irish monks was remarkable and their monasteries were staffed with monks from Ireland until the year 1497, when they were driven out by Scottish monks.

Macarius died in 1153. In 1615, his body was exhumed and transferred to the abbey church. In 1818, his relics were moved to the Mariankapelle in Wurzburg. Like all the Irish monks, Macarius joined holiness of life to holy learning and worked not only for the establishment of religion but also for the creation of a uniquely Christian culture. To learning, they also joined a love of beauty, and the books they produced are considered masterpieces of the arts of illumination.

Spiritual reading: We should not wish to see or do anything which could not be done in the presence of God and His creatures, and we shall thus imagine that we are always in His presence. (“Letter to the Scholastics at Alcalá” by Ignatius of Loyola, 1543)

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 1:18-25

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:

Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,

which means “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. He had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he named him Jesus.

Reflection on the gospel reading: Under Jewish law, Joseph as Mary’s betrothed had a right to sexual relations with Mary. Mary is pregnant, and though the neighbors likely suspect nothing, Joseph knows he is not the baby’s father. Joseph, of course, is horrified, and within his cultural milieu, marrying a woman capable of such a thing is unthinkable to him. But Joseph is a good man, and he doesn’t want harm to come to Mary. Accordingly, he decides to quietly end the engagement with Mary and move on with his life.

God, of course, has other ideas. He sends word to Joseph in a dream that the baby has a unique origin. Joseph now must put faith in his dream. Joseph, the man of faith, does that. And out of Joseph’s faith comes the fertile ground for the world’s salvation; indeed, the name given the baby by the angel in the dream, Joshua (rendered Jesus in Greek, the language of the New Testament), means, Yahweh saves. And thus it is, as the Prophet Isaiah foretold, that God is with us.

And so it is true with us that whenever we choose to put our faith in God that God is with us.

Saint of the day: Thomas De and his companions died in 1839. There is little known of the many Vietnamese natives who died during the several persecutions of Christians. During the first 20 years of the 19th century, Christianity made steady progress that was dramatically halted by renewed persecutions under the Annamite king Minh-Mang (1820-41). From 1832, Minh excluded all foreign missionaries and ordered Vietnamese Christians to renounce Christianity by trampling on the crucifix. Meanwhile churches were destroyed and teaching Christianity was forbidden. Some of the victims seem to have been induced by drugs to make temporary retractions; others endured fearsome tortures, including cutting off the limbs, joint by joint.

Thomas De, a Dominican tertiary and a tailor by profession, suffered the fate of many: execution by strangulation for giving shelter to the missionaries. Martyred with him were the Dominican tertiaries and catechists Dominic Uy, a 26-year-old; Francis Xavier Mau; the peasant Stephen Vinh; and one other. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese Christians lost their lives in the persecutions.

Spiritual reading: The reality that is present to us and in us: call it Being, call it Atman, call it Pneuma…or Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained; the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations. (“Letter to Amiya Chakravarty” by Thomas Merton, April 13, 1967)

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 1:1-17

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah became the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Perez became the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab. Amminadab became the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Boaz became the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth. Obed became the father of Jesse, Jesse the father of David the king.

David became the father of Solomon, whose mother had been the wife of Uriah. Solomon became the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asaph. Asaph became the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, Joram the father of Uzziah. Uzziah became the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah. Hezekiah became the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amos, Amos the father of Josiah. Josiah became the father of Jechoniah and his brothers at the time of the Babylonian exile.

After the Babylonian exile, Jechoniah became the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abiud. Abiud became the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadok. Zadok became the father of Achim, Achim the father of Eliud, Eliud the father of Eleazar. Eleazar became the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.

Thus the total number of generations from Abraham to David is fourteen generations; from David to the Babylonian exile, fourteen generations; from the Babylonian exile to the Christ, fourteen generations.

Reflection on the gospel reading: The gospel passage that we read today may not seem like much at first glance, but when we look a little closer, it is full of meaning. When Jesus entered human history, he entered it with all its ambiguities. The list of Jesus’ ancestors as Matthew presents it suggests that Jesus’ ancestors include holy men and women but also people who had committed sins as serious as murder and acted out of weaknesses as great as adultery. When Jesus entered human history, he acted through what was both best and worst about us.

Saint of the day: José Manyanet y Vives was born in Tremp, Catalonia, Spain on January 7, 1833 into a large and pious family. Dedicated to Our Lady at age five by his mother, he was educated by the Piarist Fathers in Barbastro. Trained in seminaries at Lleida and Urgell, he was ordained on April 9, 1859. Private secretary to the bishop of Urgell, he served as the librarian of the seminary, the administrator of the Chancery, and the Secretary for pastoral visitations. He founded the Congregation of the Sons of the Holy Family in 1864 and the Missionary Daughters of the Holy Family of Nazareth in 1874. Both were dedicated to serving Christian family, teaching, and parish ministry, and today work throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He founded schools and ministerial centers in several Spanish towns. He wrote books and pamphlets encouraging devotion to the Holy Family, to help the spiritual formation of the members of his congregations, to help families in trouble, and about school management. He founded the magazine La Sagrada Familia and worked for the construction of a temple in Barcelona dedicated to the Holy Family, which was built by Servant of God Antonio Gaudí. He died on December 17, 1901 in San Andrés de Palomar, Spain of natural causes.

Spiritual reading: For God is silence, and in silence is he sung by means of that psalmody which is worthy of Him. I am not speaking of the silence of the tongue, for if someone merely keeps his tongue silent, without knowing how to sing in mind and spirit, then he is simply unoccupied and becomes filled with evil thoughts: … There is a silence of the tongue, there is a silence of the whole body, there is a silence of the soul, there is the silence of the mind, and there is the silence of the spirit. (On Prayer by John the Solitary)

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 7:18b-23

At that time, John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” When the men came to the Lord, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?’” At that time Jesus cured many of their diseases, sufferings, and evil spirits; he also granted sight to many who were blind. And Jesus said to them in reply, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: John the Baptist in today’s gospel passage wonders if Jesus is the promised one and sends emissaries to ask whether Jesus is the one Israel has awaited. Jesus replies that the blind, the lame, the lepers, and the deaf are healed; moreover he raises the dead and preaches the good news to the poor. Jesus’ response to John, then, is unambiguous, for in Isaiah the prophet, all of these actions are attributed to the messiah. Jesus has begun the work, and we as his body in the world are to continue this work even as we ask God to heal us, revive us, and send us the word.

Saint of the day: Honoratus Kozminski as born in Poland and studied architecture at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw. When Wenceslaus was almost sixteen, his father died. Suspected of participating in a rebellious conspiracy, the young man was imprisoned from April 1846 until the following March. In 1848 he received the Capuchin habit and a new name. Four years later he was ordained. In 1855 he helped Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska establish the Felician Sisters.

Honoratus served as guardian in a Warsaw friary already in 1860. He dedicated his energies to preaching, spiritual direction, and hearing confessions. He worked tirelessly with the Secular Franciscan Order.

The failed 1864 revolt against Czar Alexander III led to the suppression of all religious Orders in Poland. The Capuchins were expelled from Warsaw and forced to live in Zakroczym, where Honoratus continued his ministry and began founding twenty-six male and female religious congregations, whose members took vows but wore no religious habit and did not live in community. They operated much as today’s secular institutes do. Seventeen of these groups still exist as religious congregations.

The writings of Father Honoratus are extensive: forty-two volumes of sermons, 21 volumes of letters as well as 52 printed works on ascetical theology, Marian devotion, historical writings, pastoral writings — not counting his many writings for the religious congregations he founded.

In 1906, various bishops sought the reorganization of these groups under their authority; Honoratus defended their independence but was removed from their direction in 1908. He promptly urged the members of these congregations to obey the Church’s decisions regarding their future.

He “always walked with God,” said a contemporary. In 1895 he was appointed Commissary General of the Capuchins in Poland. Three years before he had come to Nowe Miasto, where he died and was buried. He was beatified in 1988.

Spiritual reading: And He is called the Word, because He is related to the Father as Word to Mind; because of His declaratory function. For the Son is a concise demonstration and easy setting forth of the Father’s Nature. And if any one should say that this Name was given Him because He exists in all things that are, he would not be wrong. (Oration by St. Gregory of Nazianzus)