Several years ago, I was attending a meditation given by a priest shortly before Christmas.  He mentioned that his favorite Christmas song was “The Little Drummer Boy.”  Ever since then, I’ve listened to the words of that song more carefully and found in them some helpful points for my own reflection surrounding the birth of Jesus.  I am happy to share some of those with you as we once again prepare to celebrate this joyful feast.

In the second verse, the drummer boy recognizes that he has “no gift to bring…that’s fit to give our King.”  When it comes to Christmas, we spend a lot of time, energy, and money on gifts to give other people.  This is a respectable tradition, but do we consider giving a gift to the one whose birthday is the reason for this great day?  To be sure, the drummer boy has it right, recognizing that there is nothing that we can give Him that is fit for the Messiah.  We know that God has no need of anything from us, and that can be a humbling thought.  Even though He does not need us, He wants us.  Otherwise, He would have given up on us after the sin of our first parents.  Instead, He loves us so much that He wants us to share in the gifts He desires to shower upon us.

So, then, the question still remains – what can we give to this newborn King who has no need of anything that we can bring?  Look at the next verse as the drummer boy looks at what little he has and asks the question – “Shall I play for you…on my drum?”  Mary, His Mother, nods, and the drummer boy begins to play his drum for Jesus.  I remember reading a commentary on this song and how the author noted how foolish it was of this boy.  Why would you go banging a drum in front of a new baby?  I think that thought misses the deeper point.  In playing the drum, the boy is offering to Jesus what he has, humble as it may be, out of a sign of reverence for Him who is the Savior of the world.  Note how he plays his drum, according to the song: “I played my best for Him.”  The Lord has blessed each of us with gifts, humble as they may seem to us.  We do not have to have extraordinary gifts in order to offer them to our God.  What He wants is for us to use the gifts He has given to us as best we can as a sign of our gratitude for the giver of every gift that we have, the Lord Himself.

This Christmas, let us take some time to reflect on all of the gifts He has given to us, not worrying about what we lack or what other people have that might be more attractive than what we have.  Then, let us bring them to the newborn baby and resolve to use them to the best of our ability each day and experience the same thing the drummer boy did: “Then He smiled at me.”

As a final thought, I would like to invite all of you to consider coming to the church at some point during this final week of preparation before Christmas.  As you may know, we have Mass every day at 7 am and 5:15 pm.  We also have Eucharistic Adoration from 4 pm – 5 pm on Tuesday and Thursday.  You can also just stop in for a few quiet minutes during the day.  Coming to Mass or making a visit to Our Lord in the church can be a very helpful way of preparing our hearts to experience the coming of Christ with greater joy and peace.

Father Alford     

Feast Day: December 21^st 

I have to laugh every time we enter Advent and we hear again and again the Gospel of the Annunciation.  It is given to us on December 8^th, for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and then again on December 12^th for Our Lady of Guadalupe (though this year, the 3^rd Sunday of Advent took priority).  Last year, it came up again on the 4^th Sunday of Advent, though this year we will be meditating on the Visitation that weekend.  And, on top of all those occasions, we heard it twice this year during our Novena leading up to the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and we got it again a few days afterwards, during our Advent Lessons and Carols.  And, we will hear it again on December 20^th, Monday of the 4^th week of Advent. (We hear it the rest of the year only on the Annunciation itself, March 25^th; on Our Lady of the Rosary, October 7^th).  Don’t get me wrong, it is one of the most important moments in world history.  There are few seconds that have had as much impact as did that second upon which Mary said “yes” to the Angel Gabriel, and the Word of God, the Son of the Father, became man in her womb.  But, it has to be one of the most repeated Gospels in our liturgies!

This week, I want to go beyond this passage just a bit with a saint we celebrate this week: St. Peter Canisius.  A Jesuit scholar up in Germany after the Protestant Reformation, this holy priest was a force to be reckoned with in bringing people back to the fullness of the faith and truly swaying whole countries back to Catholicism (Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, parts of Germany … all these countries could have swayed towards various protestant sects if not for the preaching and publications of St. Peter Canisius).  But, though he was known by the end of his life for his gentleness in evangelizing, his boldness in smuggling tracts from the council of Trent to bishops who could not be there, and the popularity of his catechism (which went thorough 200 editions, in 12 languages, within his lifetime).  He was first, and best, known for a tender love for the poor and humble, and above all for our poor and humble Blessed Mother.  

I tried valiantly to track down some of his sermons on her, for they are said to be tremendous, but did not have much luck as my midnight cutoff was approaching … but, I realized something better!  When our saint first got to Vienna (center of Germany, a crossroads of Europe, and disintegrating around the fragmentation of faith which follows from sola scriptura), he started preaching fervently in the main cathedral.  And no one came.  What was the saint to do?  He had to become a living homily.  He cared for the poor, he nursed the sick, he tended the dying.  Here was a pre-curser to Mother Theresa – along with so many other saints – wearing a very different guise, working in a very different century, and entering a very different slum, but incarnating the very same radical Gospel.  As is the case whenever Christ’s love pours forth from the heart of His follower, people take notice.  The tender love that Peter had found in his Blessed Mother, now captivated the crowds in Vienna.

But how might he sum this all up?  How might he send this ember of Christ’s love down the centuries?  How can he possible package into words what he had discovered in the poor and humble mother, who loved the poor and humble multitudes?  He pondered the question as he meditated again on his rosary, and as he repeated “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.  Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus” it came to him: he would add a few words to each recitation of the angelic salutation.  He wanted to keep it short, what about: “Holy Mary, mother of God, Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death.”  These last words of our Hail Mary didn’t come from Gabriel, nor from Elizabeth, they came from St. Peter Canisius during dark days as the Church splintered and the poor suffered.  But with those several extra words, he entrusted all that suffering, and his own self, into the hands of the greatest of mothers, and he’s reminded us to do the same all these years since!

– Fr. Dominic Rankin has prayed the rosary daily since he was a little child.  It started with just a decade before bed, and then the whole rosary (14 minutes feels like a long time when you’re little!) with the family sometime in the evening.  But, those hundreds of thousands of Hail Mary’s add up over time, and it makes a lot of saints smile as we join our little greetings of our Queen to all the times they did the same!