Here’s my homily for the FEAST OF MARY, MOTHER OF GOD – which is celebrated on New Years Day every year. The readings for today’s Mass can be found at https://www.usccb.org/nab/010109.shtml
https://www.usccb.org/nab/010108.shtml
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE – May God Bless you and your families with much Health and Happiness in 2009! Fr Jim
One of the hardest things in life is to let go of old hurts. How often have we heard someone say, or even said ourselves “What you did to me and my family, or my friends I cannot forget or forgive. …” Even countries or groups of peoples can hold onto past wrongs with the desire that “one day someone will have pay for this.” When it comes to our being wronged, it is amazing how memories can go back decades, even centuries, old and looking for revenge.
The anger, the bitterness, the vile that we can allow ourselves to hold onto, which at first is something unpleasant; in time becomes part of who we are and in a sense we grow comfortable to it in a sense we allow it to change who we are. This New Years it is a good opportunity for us to take stock and ask ourselves What is it that we’re holding onto in our hearts?
Today the Church celebrates the New Year by asking us to focus on Mary, the Mother of God. And in this feast, one of the lines that jumps out from the Gospel is that all of these Amazing things that have been occurring in the birth of Jesus that we’ve been celebrating – we just heard that Mary kept all these things in her heart.
Notice that it was these joyous, miraculous wondrous things she kept in her heart. There’s no mention of her remembering the check-in guy at the Inn who wouldn’t let a pregnant woman ready to give birth a place to stay for the night. We don’t hear Mary complaining that the best this guy Joseph can do is find this smelly place where animals are kept for her firstborn child to be born. No she treasures the amazing things – she allows those memories to fill her heart and which leaves no room for the disappointments, angers and hurts. With that, Mary’s soul simply, beautifully and eternally glorifies and praises God.
What about you and I? Here on this New Year, we have yet another opportunity, another chance to start over again (it seems we get so many of them, doesn’t it?) Are we willing to let go of whatever it is that hurts, that angers, that we continue to feed? Mary, the Mother of God – and our mother gives us a parental example, a pattern to follow which can change our entire outlook of the year that has past and all that is to come. To treasure, to embrace, to keep in our hearts all of the glorious ways our God is actively blessing us. In doing that, we are called to forgive those who have “sinned” against us and not allow that to have any more space in our lives. In making her example our reality we find that we can truly give birth to Christ in our lives, in our families, in our workplace, in our world…
Happy New Year
