Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Happy Incarnation! A Joy-filled Birth of The Redeemer!
However you want to say it what a great and beautiful day we have today, that our god would send us his son today.
Megan and I went to midnight mass today and it was such a beautiful experience. This was the first midnight mass on Christmas for Megan and she had such a good time! After communion I was reflecting on the paradox of such a Christmas mass where we celebrate both the birth of our Savior and the death of our Savior. What a perfect gift! That we can rejoice in the birth of Christ, receive his body, blood, soul and divinity and celebrate the re-presentation of his death.
Finally, I want to share with you a beautiful reflection on Christmas that was in the Magnificat today from Pope Bendedict XVI, "God's sign is the baby in need of help and in poverty. Exactly the same sign has been given to us...God's sign is simplicity...God's sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendor. He comes as a baby - defenseless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts, and his will - we learn to live with him and to practice with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him...Christmas has become the Feast of gifts in imitation of God who has given himself to us. Let us allow our hear, our soul, and our mind to be touched by this fact!"

Merry Christmas to you and your family!

Adventus - Advent - Coming

It's been entirely too long. I have a bad habit of leaving this blog dormant. Well it's time to get back at it. I was going to work the other morning and didn't want to listen to music, sports radio didn't appeal nor any other type of talk radio and I already had some time of silence with Jesus in adoration so I decided to listen to a talk. I flipped on my smartphone (yup, I'm one of the 1 billion people in the world to have a smartphone. I got it back in Sept) and found a beautiful homily from Fr. Tom Halloway. He gave this to us students at UofI during advent of 2006. It's called Already And Not-Yet. Enjoy and continue to wait in joyful hope for the coming of our savior!