Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2024

Messy, Holy Families

St. Agnes Catholic Church Feast of the Holy Family https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122924.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes, Merry Christmas and happy Feast of the Holy Family.  My maternal grandmother, Barbara Emrich, grew up in the Highlands.  She and her family lived in a little house on Princeton Dr. not far from where Bellarmine University is now.  Her father, Joe Emrich, was a railroad man, working for the old Louisville & Nashville or L&N company.  Her mother, Nona, stayed at home and raised 9 children.   There were five boys and four girls in the Emrich family.  They were a deeply Catholic German family; two of the sons became priests and one of the daughters an Ursuline nun.  They embodied, in a way, an old model of what a Catholic family looked like.   In that little house, the boys had one bedroom and the girls another and they  shared one, solitary bathroom.  My grandmother was the baby of the fam...

Pray for Peace, People Everywhere

  Bellarmine University Our Lady of the Woods  Christmas Eve Vigil Mass  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122524-Night.cfm  Pray for Peace, People Everywhere  Merry Christmas, Bellarmine, to you and your families.   If you’re like my family you’ve been hearing and listening to Christmas songs for about a month nonstop.  We’ve heard them on our smart speaker, the radio, at Christmas concerts, piano recitals, and St. Agnes’ Christmas pageant.   Miriam, Max, and Petra, who are all five years old, have been really into “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  Something about the repetition in the song really appeals to their age … while also driving adults a little crazy.  When EJ, our oldest, was three, he sang “Jingle Bells” for a solid year.  The next year, he started up on “We Three Kings.”  Again for a whole year, we were hearing  ”Woah … hoh....  Star of wonder…!” Christmas songs can be overwhelming and ines...