Dear friends: For many people this was (another) difficult Christmas. I know many people who, because of Covid and the Omicron variant in particular, agonized over whether to go home or spend time with friends or family, or who simply couldn't go home...
And I know that experience myself: I was quarantined over Thanksgiving and ate Thanksgiving dinner in my room. Happily, I was able to see my family today (we were all vaxxed, boosted and tested) and even celebrated Mass for them...
But if you chose not to see friends or family out of caution, or if you were positive or exposed and could not see them, know that you did not see them out of love. Getting vaccinated, boosted and tested, and being masked and keeping social distance, is an act of love....
So is choosing not to endanger your friends and family needlessly. So if this decision was made from love, try not to have any regrets and trust your discernment. As my spiritual director always says after tough decisions, "Be at peace"...
Perhaps in the coming days, you can let your loved ones know, through a phone call, zoom call or text, that you've been thinking of them.

And remember that Jesus came into a world of sickness, disease and even pandemic, when he entered our world in the first century....
Emmanuel, God with us, is with us in all things.

May the Peace of Christ reign in all our hearts this Christmas season.

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More from @JamesMartinSJ

20 Dec
Gospel: In today's story of the Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the "Son of the Most High" (Lk 1).

Mary's experience may seem far removed from our own. After all, none of us will ever have an encounter like hers. Yet much of what...
...Mary experiences intersects with our own lives.

To begin with, God takes the initiative, as God does in our lives. But often change is frightening. So we question. Then, as the Angel does for Mary, we are reassured.

As I see it, when the Angel speaks about her cousin...
Elizabeth's pregnancy ("who was called barren"), the Angel is not so much telling her something new (Why wouldn't Mary have known this after six months?) but saying, "Look what God has already done..."
Read 7 tweets
7 Dec
One sad thing about some Catholics declaring that being transgender is sinful is that many of their comments and statements are asserted with the flimsiest of abstract philosophical and theological reasoning, treating transgender people as categories, rather than individuals...
Worse, many of these statements seem to have been written with no apparent consultation with transgender people themselves. It is quite the opposite of the "culture of encounter" that Pope Francis often speaks of, and that Jesus embodied...
It would be like issuing a statement about the ocean without ever having seen one, sailed on one, or swam in one.

As Pope Francis has said many times, we are called to be not only a teaching church, but a listening one as well. How can we teach if we don't listen first?...
Read 7 tweets
1 Dec
Happy Feast of St. Edmund Campion, St. Robert Southwell and the English Martyrs:

"And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league--all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England--cheerfully to...
..carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood...
So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.

If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour. I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God...
Read 5 tweets
30 Nov
Dear friends: I thought you might like to know the story of Mikono Refugee Crafts Shop, the @JesuitRefugee Service project that we're supporting today. It's a wonderful story about a ministry that helps refugees help themselves.

It started in a bungalow in Nairobi in 1993...
Uta Fager, an Austrian lay woman, and I had worked with the "income-generating projects" at JRS for a year, helping East African refugees in Nairobi start small businesses, like Edith's and Immaculate's batiks. People would see the handicrafts and say, "Where can I buy that?"...
We realized that it would help to have a place where we could market the refugee-made handicrafts, as well as have an office where we could meet with the refugees. It was no problem filling up the shop! And business was brisk immediately....
Read 14 tweets
26 Nov
Gospel: Today Jesus says, "Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (Lk 21). Clearly Jesus's generation did pass away before the "end times." So is this an example of Jesus's having limited knowledge? This is a question...
...that theologians wrestle with, because of Jesus two "natures," divine and human. Jesus is divine, which means he has a divine consciousness and therefore knows all things; but he is also human, and a human consciousness knows only what it has been taught. There are other...
...examples in the Gospels where Jesus seems to have limited knowledge, revealing his human nature more, as when he says "only the Father" knows the time of the end, "not the Son" (Mk 13:32).

But in this case, the NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson notes that the word "genea"...
Read 4 tweets
24 Nov
Gospel: For many people this year, Thanksgiving may be hard. In fact, the holidays overall can be hard for many people. In today's Gospel, which, like all the readings at the end of the liturgical year, focus on the "end times," Jesus reminds us of an often forgotten....
...Christian virtue: perseverance. "By your perseverance you will secure your lives," he says. (Lk 21). Jesus is speaking mainly about perseverance in the face of persecution, but it's an important goal in any life. As St. Ignatius point out, God's spirit is manifest whenever...
...we feel uplifted, encouraged or hopeful. God's spirit "builds us up." By contrast, the spirit that moves us away from God is the spirit of hopelessness, defeatism, despair. Pay attention to those movements and always follow God's voice. And persevere.
Read 4 tweets

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