Pastor’s Letter & January 10 Bulletin

Pastor’s Letter & January 10 Bulletin

8 Jan 2021 | Posted by: chadmin

The January 10 bulletin is available online.

Dear friend,

I hope you had a Blessed Christmas and New Year! While our celebrations may have looked differently this year, the reality of the Christian Feast Days and this time of year remains the same. It is a time of gratitude and thanksgiving for all we’ve received, for divine assistance and blessing, and to be a time of hopeful expectation for a better tomorrow. Like all of you, my prayer and way of praying changes over time. The reality is that different aspects of the Christian mysteries and of daily life are more personally significant at different times of our lives. This is obviously due to age, family relationships, jobs, life difficulties and personal challenges. So much affects the way we pray. One of the great beauties of Christianity is that so many ways of praying are accessible to us. We believe the celebration of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, to be the pinnacle of prayer, but every other way of prayer leads to and flows from the Mass. The Church defines the Eucharist as the source and summit of the Christian faith. Everything leads to the Mass and everything flows from the Mass. This is why the Mass is steeped in Biblical readings and the Sacrament of the Eucharist physically and spiritually feeds us. The prayer of the Mass, the whole Mass, feeds our other praying and calls us to practice in the world the lessons and the love we experience from God in church.

In its essence, prayer is a conversation with God. We pray when we read the scriptures, we pray when we have a conversation with others about God, we pray when we adore the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, we pray when we have simple internal conversations with God. There is nothing in our thoughts that needs to be excluded from prayer. God cares about what you care about. At its simplest notion, prayer is inviting God into all of your thoughts, words, actions, cares, relationships; put simply, everything we care about. When we talk to God about what we care about, the Bible and the liturgy of the Church invite us to see all from God’s perspective. Faith education at Mass or spiritual reading, all inform our intellectual understanding of Divine Will so that we can process with God how to live our lives more in communion with Him. The Seasons of Advent and Christmas, with the new calendar year, invite us into a hopeful tomorrow as authentic conversational prayer informs our growth in love.

The shortest line in the Bible, “God is love,” invites us to grow in our understanding of what “love” is. While the world talks about love in many ways, the Bible talks about love as gift of self for another. Love is not what I will get but the action of giving what I have to offer. The Christian walk of faith is a journey of praying through how we can all better love. Prayer helps us think through what love really means in how we talk to people, how we think about them, how we serve them with our time and resources, and how we put our personal preferences behind the needs of others. May 2021 bring us many blessings and healing for our culture, but may this time call us to love God and others the way God loves us.

God bless,

Father David