During Advent, I would like to focus on a different saint every week - a saint that will help us experience this lovely and prayerful season leading up to Christmas. St. Julian of Norwich was a mystic who lived in a small cell attached to St. Julian's Church in Norwich, England (from this she took her name - we don't know her real name). One window of her small room looked into the sanctuary for Mass and another opened to the street where the people would come by for her counsel and for prayer. Julian experienced her “showings,” as she called them, on the night of May 8, 1373. These were a series of revelations and visions she had received from God, all in one night. Julian wrote about these showings in her book Revelations of Divine Love, the first book published in English by a woman. St. Julian experienced and wrote of a compassionate, relational, and joyful God. She writes: “For before he made us, he loved us; and when we were made, we loved him. And this is our substantial goodness, the substantial goodness in us of the Holy Spirit. It is nothing we create; it is our substance. ... And in this endless love, the human soul is kept whole as all the matter of creation is kept whole.” We are one with God and with creation. I pray that you feel this unity during Advent. - - - Fr. Jim

Psalm 137 is the most poignant of psalms: “By the streams of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…Our captors asked of us the lyrics of our songs…How could we sing a song of the Lord in a strange land?” There are those among us who are happy to have come to the U.S. to find work, but they long for the beauty and familiarity of their home land – Mexico, or the Philippines, or El Salvador. And there are those who are in the “strange land” of grief over a loved one whom they have lost. And there are those who are ill or growing old who try to remember the “songs” of their health and their youth. We often find ourselves in a place far from where we long to be. Oh God, help me to never forget the joys of the life that I once had. Plant forever these beautiful things of life into my memory basket – my first love, the time I held my first child, the pride I felt for my granddaughter in her first school play, the joy of being with family around a Thanksgiving meal, the freshness of a summer rain on my face, the giddiness of tumbling around in an enormous pile of orange-bright Fall leaves. These are the songs of my home land, the songs that I will sing whenever I find myself in a strange, unfamiliar place. Let me never forget them. - - - Fr. Jim