“Anna was a minister of hospitality, a contemplative, and an evangelist! How much better could growing old ever get than to spend my time doing that?”

“She treasures all these things, and ponders them in her heart, always aware that the consequences of her Yes to God’s plan involve a supreme sacrifice and a total abandonment that opens up a radical freedom. The courage to say Yes is one thing – the ability to remain faithful and steadfast is indeed another.”

“the Holy Family carries an enduring significance, a universal meaning...we are invited to consider their interaction, their family relationship together, best described perhaps as a communion of love”

“Anna made a difficult status in life into a great blessing for herself, for others, and for the Kingdom of God. She proclaimed “the king of glory.” She took the light of Christ and gave it back to Him, to Mary and Joseph, to all she talked to about the child–and today, to me.”

“Today I encourage you to read Luke 2: 22-40 slowly two or three times. Then let yourself enter the scene. What in the scene as you pray draws you and holds you?”

“one of the key functions of a family is to provide a warm and loving space in which children can mature and ultimately go out from to find their own place in the world”

“The child’s life is not to be measured according to success or failure in achieving a set of human goals, but in faithfulness to God’s life giving promises. We are freed from the burden of self-fulfilment for God Himself becomes our fulfilment.”

“We all have gifts, and every time we gather as a faith community we celebrate the great diversity of the gifts around us. But yet it often seems that in this world of ours, some gifts are celebrated more than others.”

“Those who think that the Holy Family is made up of flimsy figures acting mechanically should read all the relevant texts”

“Mary and Joseph bring him to the temple because no child belongs wholly and completely to its parents. The child belongs first to God, then to his parents and through them to society.”

“There has only been one Holy Family upon earth, and it is now re-united in heaven. But scattered all over the earth there are no doubt many people and many families who try in their own way to reproduce the life of Nazareth by putting God first in everything and doing his holy will, whatever happens.”

“Simeon is telling Mary, “This child will hurt you.” Why? Because Mary was a mother, and the same movement that opened her to a mother’s love, opened her to a mother’s pain.”

“Simeon and Anna were able to recognize God’s presence in the infant Christ. They invite us to recognize God’s presence in our lives. They ask us to slow down, to look deeper, to recognize all the opportunities that lie around us...we must do more than look. We must be willing to see.”

“might I suggest on this Holy Family Sunday focus on St. Joseph, this dreamer, this man that saw at a higher level of perception, this protector of the body of Christ. Reach out to him in prayer”

“And it is the body with its appetites, its pleasures and all its various functions that God has chosen to make his love known among us. God's very self did not despise the human body but chose to inhabit it and to share in all its fullness, in all the messiness of human existence.”

“My prayer for each and every one of us, myself included, is that we may have the patience and the dedication that Anna showed, the willingness to keep going to the Temple to pray, the willingness to fast so that we may remain close to God that he may remain close to us”

“These Readings prompt us to meditate firstly on how Jesus has served and continues to serve as our great High Priest, but also how his priesthood is lived out in our own lives, since we share in his priesthood by virtue of our Baptism.”

“But where would endurance in the faith be without mercy and forgiveness”

“Does our daily intake of sensationalist, negative news stir in us compassion and recognition of Christ, the Stranger and Outcast (Psalm 69:9)? Or does it predispose us to labeling and assigning people to groups in our mind, groups to be mistrusted, feared, even hated?”

“The candles we carry to the Church recall Mary carrying Jesus the Light to the Temple...A candle gives light by expending itself, reminding us of how Jesus sacrificed Himself to ‘purchase’ the world.”

“for the temple was the place where humanity encountered divinity, where God entered into our world. So Luke is telling us that now, in the child Jesus, we have the new temple, the place where God dwells with his people.”

“In his simplicity, in his humility, in his nonviolence, purity and docility this baby refines us and purifies us...When we gaze on him as Simeon does we're meant to find our salvation”

“Does God need this sacrifice? Well of course not, God needs nothing but our salvation is affected through it. Our salvation is affected through this presentation by which we are brought back to the Father through the Son.”

“We owe God everything and yet we pay him nothing in thanks and praise...The liturgy is the act by which we thank and praise God and thereby render to God what is due to him”