A Word from our Pastor
We continue our Lenten journey with rain, and many down with the flu or other ailment. It seems lighter this year so I have not written the annual reminder that if you are ill, stay home and do now spread whatever ails you, but as more and more seem to be getting something, the above should remind you of our time tested protocols.
Lent is a time for reflection on our faith and again asking is our path of discipleship is bringing ourselves and others to be closer to the Lord. The Vatican website really seems to be providing more and more by way of good solid reflections that can help up. They are promoting their new widget that will give easy access to their pages that I encourage you to look at and maybe sign up to use.
Many parents have come to me worried through the years sadly telling me that their children no longer go to Church. I often point to St. Monica’s example when I seek to answer them. The Late Pope Benedict was featured on the Vatican website directly speaking about this situation:
“In the book “The Faith of the Future,” a homily by the then Cardinal Ratzinger presents Saint Monica and her attitude toward her son Saint Augustine as the personification of the ecclesial community: a space of life, of welcome, of freedom, where each person’s freedom is respected, and faith is never imposed.
By Andrea Tornielli (taken from the Vatican News website)
“Suffering, she learned to let him walk his own road, without constraints. She learned to endure that his road was altogether different” from the one she had imagined for him. This reflection on the mother of Saint Augustine, spoken at the consecration of the parish church dedicated to Saint Monica in the Neuparlach district of Munich.
In this homily, the Archbishop of Munich presents the figure of Augustine’s mother as a living experience of what the Church is in its most profound essence. “In her,” Ratzinger writes, referring to the saint of Hippo, “he experienced the Church as person, the Church personally, so that for him it was not some kind of apparatus, from which one feels something very distant, structures that turn out to be somewhat incomprehensible. In this woman there was personally present what the Church is.” Augustine, the cardinal recalled, wrote of his mother: “She not only gave me this bodily life, but she gave me a space of the heart, she gave me a space of life in which I was able to become a man.” The human being, Ratzinger affirmed, “needs a relational space of trust, of love; and a meaning that allows him to walk toward the future.”
But this “space of life” has little to do with ecclesiastical structures or with identity-based communities of the perfect who isolate themselves from the world, condemning it day in and day out. On the contrary, it admirably sketches the face of a welcoming Church, respectful of everyone’s freedom and of each person’s timing. Just as Monica was with her son, who considered “allowing him to be free" to be "an essential element for the formation of this vital space”: free to make mistakes, free to follow his carnal passions… Monica “knew how to wait. She knew how to accept the conflict between generations. Suffering, she learned to let him walk his own road, without constraints. She learned to endure that his road was altogether different from the one that, in faith, she had imagined for him; and yet she learned to love him, to stand beside him, not to abandon him, while still leaving him the freedom of his being. In this openness while waiting, by which she left him the freedom to become himself—not imposing the faith on him, but simply being there for him as a person, as a mother—precisely in this way she transmitted the faith to him.”
These are enlightening words for parents, for educators, and more generally for those who proclaim the Gospel. A Church as a “space of life, of freedom, of hope.”
The future Pope commented, “I believe that today there is much suspicion and aversion toward the Church… because we experience the Church very little as person, very little the Church personally. We hear it spoken of only as structure, office, and apparatus. But the Church will be able to subsist, and we will be able to take root in her and she will be able to become our homeland, only if she continues to subsist in persons. This space, all spaces—even the halls where we spend our free time and meet—should be spaces that help us to become Church in person for one another; space that for us may be vital space, mother, someone who makes available to us a place of trust and of the possibility of living.”
A Church, a “field hospital,” that accompanies you, where love heals the deepest wounds, and one feels at home.”