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James Martin, SJ Profile picture
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27 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Yesterday was the Feast of St. Stephen, the day on which my favorite Christmas carol takes place: "Good King Wenceslas." Here is an appreciation of a beautiful performance of this song, from #TheRoches...

...a wonderful group of three sisters with the tightest harmonies you'll ever hear. When I first heard this rendition many years ago, it completely upended the way I understood this familiar carol....
(And if you've not heard The Roches Christmas album "We Three Kings" you haven't celebrated Christmas.)

In their hands "Good King Wenceslas" reminds us of the need to care for the poor, on the Feast of St. Stephen and every day.
Thanks to @Terreroche and her sisters. And thanks to my friend Bruce for introducing me to them in the 1980s!

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More from @JamesMartinSJ

James Martin, SJ Profile picture
27 Dec
Fascinating essay by the theologian James Alison on the church's "dialogue" with LGBTQ people: "You will be embarking on conversations at a level of equality with people whose conscience has been formed by a tough first-person journey into truthfulness." jamesalison.com/truth-penitenc…
@JamesAlison11
I think that all the traffic just crashed the website. Check back later!
Read 4 tweets
James Martin, SJ Profile picture
27 Dec
Gospel: Today, on the Feast of St. John, we read the story in John's Gospel of Peter and the "Beloved Disciple" rushing to the empty tomb on Easter Sunday (Jn 20: 1-8). Traditionally, the "BD," an eyewitness in John's Gospel, is identified with John, the son of Zebedee....
Yet John's Gospel has a distinctly Judean focus and "John Zebedee" was from Galilee. Today some scholars think the figure of the Beloved Disciple may be a kind of "Everyman" or "Everywoman" figure. Others think it might be Lazarus (more about that in a book I'm working on)...
Whoever the "BD" is, the phrase raises an important question today: What does it mean for each of us to be a "beloved disciple" of Jesus? How can we experience ourselves as "beloved" by God, and how can we be better disciples of Jesus?
Read 4 tweets
James Martin, SJ Profile picture
26 Dec
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....
Read 6 tweets
James Martin, SJ Profile picture
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
James Martin, SJ Profile picture
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
James Martin, SJ Profile picture
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

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