St. Thomas the Apostle
Catholic Community

Starting a new year is always a good time “to take stock” of our lives. There is the tradition of making New Year’s Resolutions, and although this can be a not-to-serious endeavor for some of us, it can also help us look at our own spiritual lives and evaluate if we are growing and deepening our relationship with God, our loving Creator. We all have heard the phrase: “I don’t go to Mass because I don’t get anything out of it.” Or “The Mass does not feed me sufficiently.” I wo

Here we are already at the 4th Sunday of Advent. Where did the weeks go so quickly? Maybe some of us put off the preparing of our hearts anew for the birth of Jesus, and so we may be caught short now that it is so near Christmas. Hopefully we have all made some effort to bringing love and joy into peoples’ hearts through our project like the Giving Tree or something similar. Or possibly we have adopted some special individual or family with whom to share the Christmas spirit

Advent calls us to PREPARE. What are we preparing, and what are we preparing for? We are preparing our own hearts, so that during this season and into the Christmas season we can bring more love into this world, just as the birth of Jesus did. Jesus came to this earth to teach us how to love by being loving, and by sharing his love with every intention and action he did. We have been given that love at our own birth. It is our call to help it grow and bring forth fruit. So we

Most of us are eager to have the roots of our identity and family well secured. Isn’t that why Ancestry and 23 and Me are popular in recent years to help determine our connections? But the reality is that sometimes we feel uprooted, pulled away from our land and our home. A tree can be a good symbol for the desire we have to have roots. The readings today present the image of a tree both as hope and as challenge. John says the tree must have good fruit, or else it will be cut