Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of St. Mary,

When I was home recently I asked my brothers if anyone was interested in keeping the log that has sat on our hearth since 1968. You see, it isn’t any log, it carries for me many memories of our vacation in 1968 when I was seven years old and we went to Wyoming and Colorado. While in Wyoming, my Dad, who I now realize was twenty-five years younger than I am now, had this crazy idea to take a tree trunk from a petrified forest park in Wyoming. As I remember it, these logs were just lying around as if they had dropped from the sky, for miles. There was a broken-down fence with gates that were open; I clearly remember knowing that we were stealing, but it was very exciting. We—my Dad, me and my eight year-old brother John—hoisted this thing weighing what seemed like hundreds of pounds, into the little red wagon we had been dragging my brother Bob around in, then put it in the station wagon, and this log became our travel companion for the next week until it found a home on our hearth. Actually, we rescued a number of them, but this was the granddaddy of all that we pilfered.

The log is something of a marvel; it’s a little hard to wrap your mind around it. It looks like a tree trunk, with bark and all, but it is stone. It was a mature tree that lived 225 million years ago. I wonder what prehistoric bugs are still preserved inside?

Somebody asked me why I wanted it? Such a heavy log-looking rock. So I’ve been thinking about it. It is the same reason we take out the same Christmas ornaments each year and put them on a new (or a newly assembled) tree that takes up space in our home. Sometimes each one of these ornaments carries a different memory with it. I used to enjoy putting up the tree with the family, we would recall different things—this one used to hang on our grandparents’ cotton-white tree with the color wheel that threw changing colors up on it. This one we bought in Venice. That one we made the year we moved to the farm… We would put the tree right in the middle of our great room floor and invite all the memories back into our home.

It’s the same reason we come back around each year to familiar songs and prayers. We decorate with old and newly-created decorations hopefully so that when we walk into church it is newly-assembled to feel fresh and new, and worn, and familiar and home. We have a Eucharist, and in our thanks come to mind all the beautiful and even sometimes tired and always renewing miracles of Jesus. His call is today, throughout the years. The whole family is back in the room, even those who are gone, and we find our anchor, this is really our place, and God is here. I am grateful that you are here with us for Christmas.

Too many people are off on their own today without an anchor, without a story. Let’s write the story for our generation and generations to come, together, here. Let’s enter into the Mystery of Christ as it unfolds this beautiful season, and enfolds us in love.

God bless you, and merry Christmas!

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Already last weekend we had many people who were wishing us a merry Christmas and about to leave for parts all over to celebrate the holidays with family or enjoy a nice Christmas break vacation. For those who are traveling this week, we offer special prayers for safety. May all your visits fill you with joy and good memories; where reconciliation is needed, may unity endure; where understanding is sought, may it be found. May love be the guide for every word and situation. And may the mystery of the Son of God come to birth in a tiny child in obscurity always cause you to find wonder and awe at the desire of our loving God to “stoop down,” as the Fathers would say, to raise a suffering world with his caring love. Merry Christmas.

For those who are traveling, I want to remind you that you can always find our bulletins posted on line, so you don’t miss our greetings or any news about upcoming events in the parish. If you haven’t subscribed, all you have to do is go to our parish website (www.stmaryfred.org) and at the lower right corner of our front web page type your email address in the box and click on “subscribe.”

Giving can become such a complicated procedure. For many, Christmas has become the only time during the year when we remember each other with a card (how often do you buy stamps these days?) or bake something for our neighbors. I actually put “shopping” on my to-do list this time of year. We wonder if something has happened to someone because we didn’t get the usual Christmas card in the mail this year.

I have never liked shopping. I always wonder why I didn’t just get this done last summer when nobody was thinking about Christmas shopping yet? Every once in a while there is a nice spirit with so many people out and about and looking for that perfect gift for someone in particular, if you are lucky. More often than not I am grateful that some visionary invented the internet and the “shopping cart.”

I know a lot of families, especially older brothers and sisters, who have pretty much lost the spirit of giving. The calls come, eventually: “How much are you giving?” Of course, you don’t want to give more than somebody and make them feel bad. In the same way nobody likes to feel like they got the short end of the stick. For a while in our family we wrote checks to each other for the same amounts and basically exchanged bank balances, an equal transfer of funds. It was either give up on it all together, or re-think the meaning of why we give.

The truth is, giving can never become routine, or it isn’t giving anymore, it is just a habit. Giving is something that shapes us and makes us different from all other forms of life in God’s creation. We give because we are made in the image and likeness of God, who gives. He gives his Son. He gives his life on the cross. He gives his divine life in the sacraments. Jesus literally gives his Body and Blood, his life, his Mother, his Spirit, his Mission of blessing from the Father. How many times we read Jesus explain that the Father has given everything over to him, and all that he has received from the Father he has given to us?

Notice the gift is always the gift of self. It isn’t a gift card or a lottery ticket, or even a shiny new car with a big bow on the top. It’s something better. For this reason we often encourage our children not to think so much about buying something, but instead making  something of themselves to give at Christmas time. Something personal, because giving is meaningless if it doesn’t also involve a personal commitment of good will and love. The gift is only the expression of what is inside, a revelation, the invisible made visible.

Those actually are the words we use to describe Jesus at Christmas, the definitive Revelation, the fullness of love.

In these last days before the great Gift of Jesus, take a few moments in your busy day—commit to a few moments in each of the few days remaining—ask what might be your special gift to your family and those you love? To your parish family? What gifts has God given to you in particular? Ask God for the grace to be truly thankful for them, and truly strong in seeking ways to use them to make him known this Christmas, to bring him to birth in your life and make it visible. Above all, ask God for the ability to truly give yourself to him, and to those he loves.

God bless you.