Pastor’s Corner — June 5th, 2022
A Parishioner’s “Testament of Praise”
I receive a lot of emails. Amidst the regular business of pastoring, I am blessed to receive emails at times from parishioners who gratefully update me on what God is doing in their lives. This week a parishioner emailed me what I’m calling a “testament of praise” that she believes the Holy Spirit inspired her to write. It is beautiful, simple and powerful. I want to share it with you all:
I don’t deserve His love, He loves me anyway.
I don’t deserve His mercy, He gives it to me anyway.
I keep betraying Him, He keeps coming back.
I keep looking at others, He only has eyes for me.
I have a hard time forgiving, He holds no grudges and washes me clean.
I cannot let go of my past, He’s forgotten it already.
I don’t know if I can make it, He carries me when I can’t walk.
I don’t always listen, He keeps on calling me.
I get lost often, He meets me where I am.
I don’t give my love to all, He loves me without reservations.
My friends fit a certain criteria, He just takes me as I am.
If you cross me, I’ll retaliate, He turns the other cheek.
Now take a moment and pray through this. Let this little “testament of praise” about Jesus’ sheer goodness towards us seep into your heart. Allow it to remind you of who he is to you! Allow your hope to increase. Most of the life of faith is simply about living according to the truths of who God has revealed he is to us. The more we surrender the more we see all of this is true and the more we see all of this is true the more we surrender! Praise be to God!
Pentecost Vigil: New Members of St Pat’s
This Saturday at the Pentecost Vigil we are welcoming two new people (Jason Close and Grace Curtin) into the Catholic Church who will also be receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation. They were not able to be received into the Church earlier this year. Let’s praise God for his graciousness in leading his people home in our family!
Pentecost Prayer Service at 7:30pm Saturday
This Saturday, we’ll be praying for a new Pentecost for parishioners who desire more of God’s love and power in their lives. We’re thanking God ahead of time for his gracious outpouring of his love.
Highly Recommended Book for Catholic Parents and Grandparents
In the past two decades we’ve seen our culture slowly embrace a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity. It is little wonder why it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pass on our Christian faith to our children. This difficulty is sometimes rooted in not knowing how to communicate persuasively our unique Christian worldview in the face of such resistance of our world. So how do parents talk about difficult moral topics with their children? What about grandparents who also care for their grandchildren who might not see eye to eye with their children about parenting?
If you read my four-page letter about School Culture and Catholic Identity to the parents of the school, you’ll see I recommended a book by Trent Horn and Leila Miller, Made this Way: How To Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues (2018). Importantly, each section has advice for how to talk with “big” kids and “little” kids. I recommend this for teachers, parents, and grandparents. Even though this book is aimed at how to talk with children about these topics, this book is also a solid reference for brief summaries of why we believe what we do on these tough moral topics. Here is the official book description:
A generation ago, Christian parents didn’t have to worry about how to explain transgenderism to their nine-year-old, or help their teenager deal with mockery at school for believing in traditional marriage. But today, as our culture’s moral center continues to fly apart and with every form of deviance publicly aired and celebrated, we have no choice but to equip our kids to understand and to own the truth about such issues.
In Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues, Leila Miller and Trent Horn give parents (guardians and teachers, too!) crucial tools and techniques to form children with the understanding they need—appropriate to their age and maturity level—to meet the world’s challenges.
Their secret lies in an approach that begins not with the Bible or Church teaching but with the natural law. In kid-friendly ways, Miller (Primal Loss) and Horn (Persuasive Pro-Life) help you communicate how the right way to live is rooted in the way we’re made. God’s design for human nature is a blueprint or owner’s manual for moral living that any child can grasp through reason and apply to modern controversies over sex, marriage, life… and the quest for human fulfillment. Topics covered include:
•Sex Outside of Marriage
•Same-Sex Marriage
•Divorce
•Contraception
•Abortion
•Reproductive Technologies
•Modesty
•Pornography
•Transgenderism
•Homosexuality
Silence can no longer be an option. If we’re not teaching our children how to understand tough moral issues, then the world will.
Your servant in the Lord,
Fr. Mathias