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  Thursday – Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (New Year’s Day) Gospel – Luke 2:16-21 Mother of Us All Church of Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem I have a big secret to share, a really big one!   Are you ready?   Moms KNOW everything!   I mean literally everything!   Every event in every daughter and son’s life, good and bad, achievement and mis-step! They cherish them, feel them, hold each of them close to their heart as if they happened to her.   Moms laugh and cry and suffer through every moment of their child’s life, no matter the age or circumstance.   They know it all!   They remember it all!   They feel it all! Obviously that is not such a big secret, not at all.   But perhaps the real secret is this – they don’t always let on what they are going through.   Very often, they may laugh on the ouside, but inside they suffer silently, and they hope for us in the quiet of their hearts!    Just as we were physically a par...
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  Wednesday– 7th Day in Christmas Octave (New Year’s Eve) Gospel – John 1:1-18 Past, Present and Future Latin / Greek, Church of Dormition   Today’s Gospel – the opening chapter of the Gospel of John – really takes me back in time, all the way to my freshman year in college in the Seminary.   It was a tough academic year; we were taking 3 different languages at once: French, Latin and Greek.   And because it used a completely different set of written characters, Greek was the most difficult to not only learn but retain.   I can remember we all crafted homemade flash cards for vocabulary, and we carried them around with us everywhere.   We had to constantly refresh ourselves and test ourselves; otherwise we lost it so quickly. Which brings me to today’s Gospel.   I have a special fondness for these verses; they were one of the first translations we ever tackled.   Even today I can still rattle off the first couple of verses in Greek fro...
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  Tuesday – 6th Day in Christmas Octave Gospel – Luke 2:36-40 Honor Your Elders Western Wall, Jerusalem I wonder sometimes if we ever truly appreciate and cherish our elders, our grandparents and great-grandparents.   Growing up, my grandmother lived right next door to us. And yet it was always such a struggle for my mom to encourage us (me) to just walk over and spend time with Mom Mom.   As a kid, I suppose I felt I had better things to do.   In the summertime, there would always be a couple of weeks when my great-grandmother would come and stay with my grandma.   We would go over, offer our greetings and then quickly high-tail it outside to play.   Oh how I wish I could recover/relive those moments.   You see, my great-grandma was the daughter of Dr. Samuel Mudd.   Can you imagine how many questions I would have today and how many stories she could have shared and I could have passed on to my own grandkids!   Such a lost opportunit...
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