Newsletter- 1st Week of Christmastide
Dear Parishioners
Thank you for the many lovely Christmas cards, gifts, and generous Christmas Offerings which you have given to me this year. I hope and pray that each of you continue to enjoy a wonderful Christmas season, a chance to celebrate and to enjoy precious time with your families and friends. Thank you too to all who have helped in so many different and varied ways this Christmas in the parish. I greatly appreciate all that each of you give to the worshiping life and community of St Mary’s. It remains a great pleasure for me to serve you as your parish priest. Without your prayers, love, care and support of me, my own life and ministry here would be a great deal poorer and much harder! Thank you for your generosity and kindness over the past year.
This weekend we celebrate The Feast of the Holy Family a feast day, where we are given the beautiful opportunity to reflect on Jesus, Mary and Joseph, God’s Holy Family. The Holy Family are a model for every family; it is in them we can find inspiration and guidance, through times of happiness, joy and when we go through hardship too, asking for their intercession in prayer. On this Feast Day, we pray in thanksgiving for the vocation to marriage, for all families and each member, for those discerning marriage, those who have recently married, those celebrating special anniversaries, and for the graces that family life can bring.
As we spend the Christmas Season with our families and friends, let us pray in thanksgiving for them, asking for the guidance of The Holy Spirit. We also pray for those families who cannot be together or who struggle at this time, that through the healing power of God, there can be peace and unity. We call to mind the deceased members of our families, that they have their eternal reward with God in Heaven and give thanks for their inspiration. As we journey with The Holy Family to the stable and beyond, we hold in our hearts the importance of God’s will for our families, may we be open to hear His call, just like Joseph and Mary.
This week we will welcome in the New Year. It can, if you are like me, be a little hard to be too enthusiastic about New Year’s Day because of a conflict within us. We imagine it as a day for new beginnings, but our mind tells us that the world, and we ourselves as part of it, will continue mostly unchanged. Most of us have at some time made New Year resolutions to live a changed and better life, only to find that three or four days later we carry on living as before!
This new year, the reminders of continuous struggle are strong. We are aware of the many difficulties and problems within the world around us, people are uncertain and seem often to be despondent for the future. New Year’s Day is a time to look back on the year gone, to accept where we stand at the beginning of the new year, and to attend to how we wish to live personally and as a society in the coming year ahead. The Christian approach to the New Year is to emphasise attending to the goodness of our world and of all the people in it and to keep Hope alive.
Let us be hopeful for the future year ahead as we begin 2025 this coming week and let us remain open to the power of God’s transformative love at work in our lives. It is the same love that we celebrated in the birth of the Christ child at Christmas a love which remains a constant in our midst now as we look towards the future at the start of 2025.
May I anticipate the New Year this weekend by wishing every member of our parish community and those visiting with us a very Happy 2025 when at last it comes!
With my prayers for you and for our parish community as we approach the New Year together,
Your parish priest and friend,
Fr Jonathan
2024 28th December – Newsletter – Download