Merry Christmas and Happy New year! I have forgotten how busy the life of a priest can get before Christmas. I had to look back on the calendar to see what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks. Here at the parish we ended the season of Advent Christmas eve morning with the Mass of the day. We had Mass nearly every day during Advent. My hope is that this helped to foster the spiritual preparation of the parish for the celebration of the Birth of Our Lord.
Since Christmas landed on a Friday this year I spent the week preparing my homilies for both Christmas and Holy Family which landed the following Sunday. We began to celebrate Christ’s birthday Christmas Eve with carols at 4:30pm. We followed with Mass in English at 5pm Mass and Spanish at 7pm. The late night crowd started arriving at the church at 10:30 to save seats for the Midnight Mass (at midnight) and we ended about 2pm. Later Christmas morning we celebrated the “Mass of the Day” at 9:30 in English. The songs, the scriptures, and the community seemed filled with joy and awe at the mystery of our Lord’s birth.
We did have some trials through it all, but I kept laughing. After all, why should everything go perfectly my first year as a pastor? At the 5pm vigil we had no baby Jesus! At the 7pm vigil we had three! At midnight Mass, my homily seemed to have disappeared! So, by 9:30am morning Mass, nothing was forgotten. All I could do was laugh and enjoy the time spent with the people of God.
In the secular world Christmas is over, but for the Catholic Church we celebrate Christmas until the mass of the Baptism of our Lord. This gives us a fuller spiritual sense of the mystery of God present among us. So the following Friday I began again at 5pm Saturday night to prepare for the weekend vigil Mass of the Holy Family followed Sunday by our regular Mass schedule. At the weekend Masses I reminded everyone that January 1st the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God. I told them that this day is a holy day of obligation. We the church are a family, and just as we have family obligations at Christmas time, we have family obligations as a Church to celebrate certain feasts, particularly one celebrating the Mother of our Lord. So tomorrow we will have Mass at the Church here during the Christmas Season at noon in honor of our Lady.
I love being a priest this time of year!
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