Pastor’s Letter: January 7, 2024

Pastor’s Letter: January 7, 2024

5 Jan 2024 | Posted by: chadmin

Dear friend,

I hope you had a Blessed Christmas and New Year! This is a true 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 and all prayer leads to and flows from the Mass. The Church defines the Eucharist as the source and summit of the Christian faith. 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, to the feasts of Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord all invite us into a hopeful tomorrow as authentic conversational prayer informs our growth in love.

This weekend we celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord and on Monday the Baptism of the Lord.  These feasts end the Christmas Season. Very quickly, we move liturgically from Advent to Christmas, to the Epiphany to the Baptism of the Lord, which starts the Ordinary Time of the Church year. We will remain in Ordinary Time until we start Lent on Ash Wednesday, February 14. We see in the Epiphany celebration and in the Baptism of the Lord, Jesus revealing His true nature. Jesus reveals Himself in order to invite us into communion with Him.  We are called to put ourselves in a position to receive what He offers. The received grace of Baptism places an indelible mark that forever makes us adopted sons and daughters of the Father, and also gives grace that is renewable through the blessing of Holy Water and the reception of Confession and Eucharist. Our practice of the faith in Church solidifies that the Father is saying to us, as He said to Jesus, you are my beloved son or daughter. If we allow ourselves to accept, embrace and live our family role within the body of Christ, the Church community of believers becomes for us a source of strength, healing and love. While no human relationship is perfect, our relationship to God through the Church sacraments does provide us with God’s presence. Because we are His children, we benefit from His love and forgiveness and are called to live the family life well. Have a great year!

God bless,

Father David