Pastor’s Letter: November 12, 2023

Pastor’s Letter: November 12, 2023

10 Nov 2023 | Posted by: chadmin

Dear friend,

On Saturday, November 11, St. Philomena School held the annual School Auction. At its base level, we run an auction to help financially support the school. While our enrollment is strong, tuition collection never fully pays for the cost of the whole educational system. Our goal is to always offer the best education to our students by maintaining our facilities and providing resources to our educators. The Auction is one of the ways we help fund our many campus needs. As always there are so many people to thank for the event. The planning time for an auction is truly an all year endeavor. The Auction chairs and all the committee members and volunteers give countless hours to ensure the evening is a fun event for those who attend and also a successful fund raiser for the school. A sincere thank you to all who participated in this year’s benefit auction. While we hold the auction event in our Banquet Room, the use of technology allows for online bidding of items to begin a week before the event and for us to live stream the presentation portion of the evening to the wider community. If you missed the live stream and would like to watch it, the recording should still be available on YouTube. Sam Mangieri of Fiat Films produces a video for us each year to emphasize some of the current excellence in our education. The video is worth a view to see how we, as a community, are supporting the staff, faculty, and student body at St .Philomena. Thank you again to all who helped organize and fund this annual benefit auction.

In the month of November, the Church calendar winds down as we move toward Advent. Advent, which prepares us for Christmas, begins a new Church calendar each year. The end of the Church year allows us the time to reflect on the ends. In life, we go through many beginnings and ends. Of course, the ultimate end for us in relationship to this world is our own death. The ultimate end for the physical world is described to us Biblically as the end times. Both the end of our lives and the end of time are events that require us to reflect on judgment and presenting our lives to God in Heaven. The Gospels are filled with stories and parables from Jesus about preparing ourselves for meeting Him eternally. The Gospel story this weekend tells of five wise and five foolish virgins who sought to be chosen by a groom at a wedding ceremony. While this method of getting married and being chosen on the day of a wedding is foreign to our understanding of dating and engagement, the story focuses on how well one is prepared for what’s next. Almost everything we engage requires some kind of preparation. The stories of Jesus encourage us to focus on preparation for the most important moment of every life in the transition from this life to eternal life. The foolish women didn’t prepare for a long wait to begin the wedding. They ran out of oil in their lamps. None of us knows how long we’ll live in this life, so we are called to fill ourselves with the oil of holiness that prepares us to meet Jesus and have a successful judgment. Religious practice, the Mass and Eucharist, and the moral life are all ways for us to continue filling ourselves with the oil of His Truth that our lives might be daily growing toward and preparing for eternal life.

God bless,

Father David