Merry Christmas

December 23. 2020

Dear Friends,

A very Merry Christmas to you all on behalf of the staff and myself. This Christmas is going to be different from any Christmas that we have celebrated in our life time. Our families won’t be able to gather around the Christmas tree and open gifts. We can’t celebrate with the same family Christmas dinner that makes this feast so special. This is a great sacrifice. Fortunately, the virus doesn’t travel over the telephone, internet, Zoom and the other wonderful mediums that our generation has developed to connect families and loved ones. We are so fortunate to have this.

But let’s not lose sight of the blessings that this Christmas offers: the opportunity to de-secularize Christmas and focus on the sacred for a change; to escape the many raucous parties and false icons of a secular holiday. Instead, we are offered the opportunity to reflect in the quiet of our homes and celebrate the real meaning of Christmas; the mystery that has been celebrated for 2000 years in glory and splendor. As the prophet Isaiah reminds us: into the world of doom and gloom, God sent his only son as our Savior. Born into inauspicious surroundings, the very surrounds of his birth signal a God who loves; who does not put-on airs, wield thunderbolts of anger or condemn the non-compliant. Rather, it reveals a God who loves us so much that He gets right down into the nitty gritty of a very messy world, lives in our squalor, in order to lead us by faith and hope to a life which only God can create and sustain. The joy of Christmas is the joy of hope, liberation and salvation. We can still celebrate this Christmas with hearts full of gratitude, and with our friends and family even if they are only connected by social media this year.

Masses for all of the holy days of Christmas are taped and will appear on our webpage. If you are still hesitant about coming to one of the five Christmas Masses, you can connect with us electronically and hopefully feel the closeness of our community. If you want to come to Mass, please observe the usual precautions and remember to get tickets ahead of time because we must limit the numbers in each Mass to 50% of capacity. If there are tickets for each Mass left over, the ushers will be outside the entrances giving them out to people who show up without a ticket.

I have a Christmas gift for you. It is two books for each family in the parish. They are exceptionally good reads and are available in the vestibule of the church. One is called “Doing Something Beautiful for God” which offers saying for every day of the year by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The other is called “I Heard God Laugh” by Matthew Kelly: a wonderful, down to earth reflection on every day spirituality for Catholics. You can stop by and pick yours up after Christmas or pick them up when you come to Christmas mass.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Finally, we must say goodbye to Father Richard as he leaves us to take up his new responsibilities as pastor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish in Tenafly, New Jersey. I am grateful for his pastoral care to our parishioners and his companionship to me as a fellow Carmelite over the past 5 years. We wish him the very best and pray that he will arrive safe and sound in the midst of a cold winter in New Jersey.

May God bless you in the new year and let us pray that we will soon be out of the grasps of this terrible virus which has taken such a terrible toll on all of us.

Merry Christmas,
Father Fred