Holidays and Holy Days
Here you will find musings related to Advent and Lent, Christmas and Easter along with reflections prompted by holidays like Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, and the onset of summer. It’s also a place for thoughts on Holy Days and related topics like the communion of Saints and the Sacraments. Posts are pictured with the most recent first. Look for season-related series or start with one of these popular reflections:
- 5 Thanksgiving Psalms to Pray This Week
- 40 Days in the Word: 3 Ways to Add Scripture to Your Lenten “Diet”
- Praying with the Penitential Psalms
- Find Peace This Advent
- The Jesse Tree: An Advent Tradition for the Whole Family
"Top dollar for bones," read the sign in the gas station window. Bones are everywhere, here in the New Mexico desert, and tourists will pay big money for a perfect set of elk horns, or a large skull, or a clattering row of vertebrae. I have loved bones ever since my fifth-grade class cleaned and bleached and sorted a pile ...
—Christ is risen! —He is risen indeed! Alleluia! —May the glory of the Resurrection remind us that with God, nothing is impossible! I find myself repeating that a lot this year, as impossibilities pile up around me. I have been taking them to the foot of the Cross — but today, Easter Sunday, I am met with the reminder that ...
Today we enter the darkness. We feel the betrayal of Judas, then stand at a distance with Peter, deny Jesus ourselves. Like Peter, we are afraid. What use is there, for all this suffering? On Good Friday, we enter into it. We stand horrified beside the cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" We are crushed by the ...
This coming week — Holy Week — can be hard. Sunday will be hard, to start, with a good 15 minutes of Gospel reading at mass, plus the procession of palms, and the homily.... Church will be long. And the kids will fidget in their seats while adults pretend not to. Prepare yourself ahead so you can enter in. Because ...
I sat with my grandmother in the hospital toward the end of her life, miserable to think that she would soon be gone. As was typical with her, she was the one comforting me. At 22, I couldn't imagine life after anybody's death . . . but she could. "But God, Sarah," she said. "...but God! No matter how black the picture ...
The first (and last!) horror movie I ever watched was "Wait Until Dark." I was ten. I will never forget the way Audrey Hepburn, blind and alone in her apartment, evened the score against the men trying to find her by breaking the light bulbs one by one ... then her helpless panic when she heard the refrigerator door open ...
Lent is making me grumpy. I decided this year to give up more food than I usually do and my stomach and head are not happy. So Sunday’s readings really speak to me: will I be like Israel, complaining in the desert, or will I be like the woman of Samaria who looked to Jesus to fill her need? What ...
The view from the Mount of Transfiguration (if it was, indeed, Mt. Tabor that Jesus was on that day) is spectacular. It's a long, winding trip to the top. The road today is so narrow and crooked that only small taxi buses or people on foot make the trek. I like to imagine Peter, James, and John hiking up there ...
"The serpent asked the woman, 'Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?'" (Gn 3:1) "The tempter approached and said to Jesus, 'If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.'” (Mt 4:3) There's a reason these passages are paired in the readings today. The devil ...
