Pastor’s Letter: November 6, 2022

Pastor’s Letter: November 6, 2022

4 Nov 2022 | Posted by: chadmin

The November 6 bulletin is now available online.

Dear friend,

Saturday, November 12 is our annual school auction. The theme this year is Through the Eye of a Tiger. The auction began as a way to help raise funds to increase teacher salaries. This continues to be the main funding purpose for the auction to support our school. The more successful our school auction is financially, the less demand on the church income. Over the years, the auction has helped us push forward with renovations and the implementation of new curriculum and technology. Over the last few years, the auction fund-a-need raised money for our bathroom renovations, replacing playground equipment, and improving our learning environments. Thank you to everyone who donates, volunteers, or supports the auction. The auction is one more example of why our community is a blessing to us all. You can get information about the auction or watch the livestreamed event at stphils.maxgiving.bid. Thanks for the support.

This past week we celebrated All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. These spiritual days encourage us to reflect on the beauty of our Catholic Christian faith and the dignity of every soul. We all came from God and we all will return to God. The gift of the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus is all about revealing the truth of God and bringing all souls to salvation. All Saints’ Day gives us the opportunity to thank God for the example of all the saints in heaven, those we know and those we don’t. The Church has the process to canonize saints to investigate a saint’s life and miraculous intercession in order to establish that saint must be with God in heaven. However, as Christians we believe every soul in heaven is a saint, as heaven is God’s perfect house. There are thousands of canonized saints in our Church tradition but there are millions of saints in heaven that we don’t recognize on our Church calendar. We recognize the saints for their holiness

In the Gospel this Sunday Jesus says, “The Children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels.” These words are a response from Jesus about the state of one’s afterlife. A few weeks ago, I wrote about God having no favorites. We are all equal in God’s eyes. This quote of Jesus communicates that we will have no favorites in heaven. “We are like angels”, meaning we will love like the angels. We will not become angels, but upon entrance into heaven, we will not have favorites in the kingdom of heaven. Of course, we believe that we will know our loved ones in heaven; however, we will not love our earthly family members “more” or “better” than we love everyone else in heaven. This divine perspective on the kingdom of heaven gives us a challenge to love others on earth as if we are already in heaven. This is a great challenge, but one that invites us to imagine what authentic other-directed love looks and feels like. The command to love God and love neighbor on earth helps prepare the soul to enter heaven. We all are on a heavenly preparatory program, may we all see our goal as heaven that every day brings us one-step closer.

God bless,

Father David