Parish Bulletin for Sunday, April 5, 2009

Sixth Sunday in Lent

Palm/Passion Sunday

Of the four Gospels, Mark is recognized as the earliest, simplest and, in the gradual development of theological interpretations of Jesus, the most human. The divine Jesus of John's gospel is still a half-century away. The messianic identity of Mark's Jesus is a profound secret to his fellow Jews, to the Romans and, it would seem, even to his own followers, who abandon and deny him on the eve of his death.

In the Passion account we read today, a frantic Jesus struggles in prayer in the garden, begs to be spared this deadly course, cries in apparent despair from the cross. The Gospel ends with a question mark, as terrified women flee in silence from an empty tomb and their encounter with a messenger claiming that Jesus has risen.

Our own well-established Easter faith -- the happy ending to the story -- spares us now the extended dark interval the early church must have endured after Jesus' death, as faith in the resurrection gradually emerged from despair like a slow dawn of recognition after a long night of grief. A catastrophe is revealed as the glory of God's absolute love absorbing sin and death, a necessary death foretold in the Law and the Prophets.

Why do we read these long accounts of Jesus' suffering at the start of Holy week? Because these texts have the power to move us emotionally and locate us personally in the story. This is what worship is for, to rehearse us through the stages of our own faith development.

Mark's Passion is meant to take us personally to the zone before faith, to find in Jesus' dark struggle to trust God the unfinished faith of our own encounters with grief and loss. What is already revealed in Jesus is still a work in progress in us. The outcome is assured from God's side, but incomplete on our side, because Easter faith must still be received and incorporated into our own story, our walk through the shadowy ambiguities to come, decisions to be made and challenges to be faced.

If the dramatic, communal sharing of Mark's Passion quickens our heartbeat and brings to mind the many murders that affront us each day in the news, the judicial crimes that imprison and abandon so many among the poor and desperate among us, the crushing despair of millions around the world caught below the safety nets of economic and social survival – then we are accompanying Jesus today.

If the images of the Passion help us join our own feelings of betrayal, loss and loneliness to those of Jesus, we are renewing our baptismal commitment to die with Christ in order to live with Christ, a lifelong surrender that makes our own suffering redemptive for others. If we find in Jesus' innocence a deeper sense of our own sin – as silence and neglect in the face of the suffering of others, as failure to risk love when it is required of us or offered to us – then we are learning of our need for God's mercy and about the joy of conversion.

Palm/Passion Sunday invites us to consciously dedicate the week ahead as holy, to enter it and deliberately focus our minds and hearts on the holy work of accompanying Jesus: to the table of the Last Supper, to the garden of his agony, to the trial before his accusers, and, finally, to the cross that awaits him. We are both witnesses and full participants because this is our story. This is how we will get to Easter.

That all our beloved dead, especially

TUESDAY, April 7

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Nelson and Deniz Raposo

WEDNESDAY, April 8

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Mary Waychison

. . . may live again in the presence of the God of limitless love . . . for all who are grieving the loss of their health, their youth, their lost hopes, their loved ones . . . . Lord, in your mercy . . .hear our prayer.

In thanksgiving for all that our God has given to us . . . Lord, in your mercy . . . hear our prayer.

For the sick, especially for all those who have asked for our prayers . . . for healing for the sick . . . for courage for those in pain . . . for those who struggle with the challenges of everyday life . . . Lord, in your mercy . . . hear our prayer.

Celebrating the Triduum
At Holy Spirit Church, April 2009

At the end of the season of Lent, the Christian community gathers together to celebrate the most holy of days in our Christian experience. The triduum is a single celebration that takes place over a three-day period – from the Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday and continuing until the conclusion of evening prayer on Easter Sunday.

One of signs that marks these three days as one celebration is the silence that is woven through the fabric of the triduum celebration. We are called to remember and celebrate the saving death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

As followers of the Christ, we are meant to focus on our immersion in the paschal event and to discover anew how we are to live the saving death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus-right here and right now. When we celebrate the Triduum, we find ourselves placed right at the centre of the paschal mystery.

Holy Thursday           April 9, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Church opens at 6:00 p.m.

The one feast of the Triduum begins with the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday evening. The gospel reading from John draws us into a deeper understanding of Eucharist.

Through the powerful symbolic washing of feet, we ourselves are called to embrace the lifestyle of the servant Jesus. This is no mere role-playing or re-enactment, but rather a clear message that eucharist and service are intimately intertwined.

Good Friday            April 10, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.
Church opens at 11:00 a.m.

The Mass of the Lord's Supper ends in silence and the gathering of the community for the Celebration of the Passion of the Lord begins in silence. The focus of this day is the saving death of the Lord Jesus and our participation in it.

How do we live out the values of the reign of God so that we are able to stand as a stumbling block to the forces of darkness and evil?

Holy Saturday      Easter Vigil           April 11 2009 at 7:00 pm.
Church opens at 6:00 p.m.

The Vigil begins in darkness and silence. As the third celebration in the triduum, the Easter Vigil proclaims Christ's victory over sin and death and our sharing in this wondrous gift of salvation.

The great Paschal Triduum is meant to be celebrated as one. A solemn proclamation from the Lord God begins the liturgy of the word on Holy Thursday; the solemnity of solemnities has begun.

From the original celebration of Passover, when the Lord liberated Israel from captivity, we progress over the next three days to the fulfillment of the Passover, when the risen Christ liberates us from sin and death. Join our community of faith as we celebrate the Easter Triduum.

Holy Spirit Church
Triduum

Holy Thursday
Mass of the Lord's Supper            7:00 p.m.

Good Friday
Stations of the Cross                          12:00 noon
Celebration of the Lord's Passion       3:00 p.m.

Holy Saturday
Easter Vigil                                   7:00 p.m.

Easter Sunday
Masses:      8:30 a.m.      10:00 a.m.      11:30 a.m.

Parish Bulletin for Sunday, April 12, 2009

Easter - Alleluia! Alleluia!

Jesus lives! Jesus is risen! God has raised up Jesus and made him Lord and Christ!

These are just a few of the many ways that believers in Jesus speak to their faith in the Resurrection. As this central tenet of all of our believing and all of our living is celebrated today and in the weeks to come, preachers and those people listening to them may find it challenging to wrap their minds and hearts around this mystery. Of course, we will hear and believe what Peter will proclaim in the first reading from Acts, that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus have brought forgiveness to sinners.

We will also agree as Paul (second reading) reminds the Corinthians that the risen Jesus empowers believers to set aside malice and wickedness so as to live in sincerity and truth. We will also rejoice as the young man featured in the Marcan Gospel of the Resurrection announces to the women at the tomb that Jesus has been raised. He goes before us, and we shall see him, he assures us. With these sacred texts for inspiration, some will be moved to speak of new life and new beginnings and new possibilities for growth. Others will talk of victory, forgiveness and reconciliation. Still others will draw parallels between the sacred rites and the reflection of these truths in the world of nature. What has been seemingly dead is now coming to life once again just as trees remember their leaves and buds open into blossoms.

However, at the heart of all our proclaiming and celebrating and remembering, the fact remains that the resurrection is, as Karl Barth once asserted, "a difficult dark truth and a word that can scarcely be tolerated by our ears" (Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, Mont.: 2008).

Indeed, insisted Barth, we are "threatened by resurrection" because we do not like to admit that we are deeply imprisoned in our world of sin and death and that we are incapable of helping ourselves. "Admit it," dared Barth, "there is no way out of this life with its thousand festering needs. Nothing, except the possibility of a miracle can help us. Resentful of this infringement on our self-sufficiency and reluctance to rely on anyone else, even God, we are threatened by the need that the very idea of resurrection raises." Resurrection cannot be achieved by human progress, evolution or even enlightenment. Resurrection is a call from God into the depths of human suffering and dying. "Rise up!" says God. "You are dead, but I call you to live."

This is what we celebrate today: the call to life from our God. Take away this summons, said Barth, and make of it something smaller and less than the absolute ultimate or all-powerful, and you have taken away the last hope for humankind.

In order to live and breathe within the embrace of that hope, in order to hear that powerful summons of God calling us to life, we must first hear and deal with another word —"death." We must look death in the face and not be cowed; we must see the deaths of our loved ones and even our own dying not as a last word but as the penultimate utterance that listens desperately in the darkness for what can be spoken only by God: "Resurrection!" We must realize, Barth insisted, that every path we walk in life will lead to the edge of the precipice of death. We ourselves cannot bridge this precipice; we ourselves cannot make of this precipice a passage. These salvific achievements have been made for us by God in Christ Jesus, who is both our bridge and our passage. While the freedom and life afforded us in Jesus are indeed wondrous, there is also pain. For just as resurrection proclaims true freedom, it also reveals the chains that bind us. It alerts us to our sin and selfishness; resurrection tells us that our only refuge against the terror of ourselves and our finitude is God. Nothing of our own devising can help us to shake ourselves free of our sins.

However, if we are able to face the "threat" to our security that comes with God's call to resurrection, if we are willing to recognize our absolute poverty before God; if we are willing to recognize that resurrection is not something we can merit but the merciful rescue of God for the lost; if we are able to surrender all our masks and defences and give up every pretense of independence, then God will indeed lift us up and out of ourselves and out of our dying to life. We can truly proclaim with loud voice – Alleluia, Alleluia! Happy Easter.

That all our beloved dead, especially

TUESDAY, April 14

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Samuel Johns

WEDNESDAY, April 15

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Maria Mary Yau

THURSDAY, April 16

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Cordelia D'Silva

. . . may live again in the presence of the God of limitless love . . . for all who are grieving the loss of their health, their youth, their lost hopes, their loved ones . . . . We pray . . .

For the sick, especially for all those who have asked for our prayers . . . for healing for the sick . . . for courage for those in pain . . . for those who struggle with the challenges of everyday life . . . We pray . . .

Something to Think About….

Liturgical Celebration in our Church and in the World. Do we connect the dots . . . .

Easter is the greatest liturgical feast of the year. Most Catholics seem to believe that the more they attend Mass, the more often they bring God into their lives. This is very good: The more we bring God into our lives, the better for God and for us. Yet it is wise to remember that Jesus did not direct our focus to heaven but to earth. He distinctly said: "God's kingdom is within you, inside you, among you, all around you." Which surely means that we don't have to do special things to bring God into the world because God is already here, already busy doing with us whatever we are doing.

The great theologian Karl Rahner called this activity of God in our world "the Liturgy of the World." Our Church liturgy focuses our minds on the marvelous works of God –beautiful and meaningful. This is important and necessary, lest we forget, but it is more about God than about us. And, to tell the truth, recalling the excruciating crucifixion of Jesus at Mass hurts us much less than our own throbbing tooth at night. There is nothing wrong with that.

That is the way it was for Jesus himself. He was not born at a solemn Mass in Saint Peter's, he was not baptized in a font sculpted by Michelangelo, he was not buried in a gold sarcophagus, he did not rise among lilies and the Alleluia chorus. Jesus was born in a smelly cave, baptized in a muddy river, buried in a stranger's grave, rose from death when nobody was looking. And since Jesus is the focal point of every Catholic liturgy, then his ordinary, earthly life was really the original Liturgy of the World.

It is in Jesus that the Liturgy of the Church and the Liturgy of the World come together. But it is not an artificial bonding, as if we were gluing together two different things. No, the word liturgy literally means "people-work."

And since people can work only with God, then every single thing we do is also God-work. It is liturgy, whether we know it or not. Our only choice is to celebrate it or ignore it. The Liturgy of the World's calendar marks off the rise and fall of civilizations, the wars and peace of the nations, while the church calendar highlights creation, the life of Jesus, the coming of God's Spirit and the culmination of the whole cosmos. These are not competing calendars. They are simply different ways of marking the one history of God in the world. God was and is involved in every evolutionary process, in every event of every civilization, in every battle and armistice.

God is the Grand Liturgist who leads all of creation in one cosmic liturgy. God is the Deacon of Ceremonies who organizes every worldly event into its heavenly position; God is the Master Musician who orchestrates each earthly note into heavenly harmony; God is the Head Usher who assures that no thing and no one is left out. All over the earth, from the rising to the setting of the sun, from the beginning to the end of the world, a single voice constantly rises from earth to heaven. We cannot hinder it – we can only celebrate or exclude ourselves.

As we celebrate the Church liturgies of this Easter season, let us remember who has called us together and what we are called to do. We live in a world that would really like to forget – Easter joy, Easter hope, Easter love and Easter faith. Understand that Jesus is all of these for believers and that we celebrate this together in the Church liturgy and in the Liturgy of the World – if we truly understand his message.

Happy Easter from all those who serve you – your pastor, your deacon, the priests who come to celebrate with you, your pastoral worker and all who work so hard to make sure we can and do celebrate liturgy together.

Parish Bulletin for Sunday, April 26, 2009

Third Sunday of Easter

The Call to Witness

In the 1985 movie Witness, an 8-year-old Amish boy named Samuel Lapp witnesses a murder in a Philadelphia train station bathroom. Because of what he has seen, the boy, his mother and the detective who was wounded while trying to protect them are forced to flee from the murderers. Having witnessed a death, their own lives will be endangered until the criminals are brought to justice. In order to survive, they hide out in plain sight within a rural Amish community.

Witnessing of another sort is featured in today's readings. Rather than be witnesses only of the death of their Lord and friend, the disciples were called to witness to his life. Like the young Samuel Lapp, the witnessing of those first believers put their lives in danger. Charged by the risen Lord to bear authentic witness to the suffering, dying and rising of Jesus and to the forgiveness and salvation that have been made available to all sinners through him (Lucan Gospel), the disciples offered brave and bold testimony (Acts).

While they had previously been reluctant to raise their voices in public or to attract attention to their association with Jesus, their experience of him as risen made them fearless witnesses. By virtue of that witness, their numbers grew along with their realization that Christ died not just for their sins or only for the sins of the Jews "but for those of the whole world" (1 John).

This realization of the universal love and saving concern of God required those earliest witnesses to Jesus to set aside their fears and suspicions as well as their preferences and preconceptions in order to witness to all without exception. Their universal witness also demanded a willingness to learn other languages, to appreciate other cultures and to value and reverence the differences of others. Adaptability and accommodation became the order of the day as those first witnesses remembered how Jesus had lived and moved among them. Rather than attach himself to any known institution or set up a permanent base of operations, Jesus had an agenda that was determined by the needs of those he had come to serve.

For that reason, every place became a venue where Jesus would witness to the love of God. In doing so, he extended the tender mercies of God to all human persons without distinction. Nor was there a certain limited time frame in which Jesus offered his testimony; every moment of every day and night, whether convenient or inconvenient, whether planned or spontaneous, every moment was ripe with opportunity for the witness of his words and works.

As always, our reflection on Jesus and on those first followers, through whose witnessing we have come to believe, requires a look inward. Because we have the privilege and responsibility of continuing to testify to the dying and rising of Jesus, ours is a witness that must be true. Like Jesus' witness, the witness we bear is to be creative, constant and conspicuous. Even before we utter a word, our demeanor with regard to all things and all persons should speak volumes about our care and respect and about our devotion and dedication in all things great and small.

On this quality of Christian witness, Thomas Merton once said, "A saint preaches sermons by the way he walks and the way he stands … the way he picks things up and holds them in his hands." Merton also described a saint as "a window through which God's mercy shines on the world and for this reason he strives to be holy in order that the goodness of God might not be obscured by any selfish act." What Merton has said of saints could also be said of witnesses to the person and mission of Jesus. Every action, at every moment, is to reveal the heart of the one who acts. Every action witnesses to the faith that motivates and inspires it.

It follows then that every word must clarify and not contradict the actions that define and identify us as Christ's disciples. When our manner of witnessing becomes a way of life, and when our manner of living becomes itself a credible witness, then will we be able to offer the worthy testimony that will enable others to recognize and accept the truth of the good news by which we are saved.

That all our beloved dead, especially

TUESDAY, April 28

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Leonard Machado

WEDNESDAY, April 29

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Maria Mary Yau

THURSDAY, April 30

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Mary Waychison

FRIDAY, May 1

Weekday

8:30 a.m. - † Lucia Maneinelli

. . . may live again in the presence of the God of limitless love . . . for all who are grieving the loss of their health, their youth, their lost hopes, their loved ones . . . . We pray . . .

For the sick, especially for all those who have asked for our prayers . . . for healing for the sick . . . for courage for those in pain . . . for those who struggle with the challenges of everyday life . . . We pray . . .

Let us pray quietly for the grace of the Holy Spirit in our lives where we are most in need . . . for all that we need to become the holy men and women God intends us to be . . . for our neophytes who professed their faith at the Easter Vigil . . . for those who have celebrated Confirmation this weekend . . . for those who have celebrated First Eucharist this weekend . . . We pray.