Happy Easter, everyone! Jesus is risen from the dead! Death has no power over us, death has lost its sting. What a blessing to be a part of this amazing faith. What a joy to be loved so deeply by God. May every step we take, every word we speak and even the thoughts in our mind praise Him for saving us and making His victory our victory.
I’m so blessed by how many people joined our parish family this year. All over our diocese, and it appears all over our country, people were baptized and confirmed in numbers the Catholic Church hasn’t seen in years. This is such a blessing for all of us. Please make sure the newest members of our family know how very much we love them.
A reminder to all of us that Easter is not a day, it is a season: 7 weeks of celebration. We will sing the Gloria once again at our Masses, and we will proclaim “Alleluia!” before we hear the words of Jesus. We also may, at some Masses, renew our baptismal vows and be sprinkled with holy water to remember our baptism…so many things to remind us that the challenge of Lent is over and we have entered the resurrection with Christ.
During the Easter season, Fr. Le and I will preach themed homilies like we did during Lent. We will walk everyone through each part of the Mass in our homilies to help us enter into Mass with more knowledge and more love. I’m quite excited about this and hope you find it helpful.
We are wrapping up an exceptionally challenging and blessed time, so the parish staff and I are going to go a bit easy this week. We’ll just try to catch up on our rest and clear our minds a bit. Please be patient with us.
We have some wonderful news. Fr. Tom Nenneau often helps us out here at Holy Family. He has expressed a desire to be a part of our community in a more intentional way. For a lot of retired priests, this is what they long for; they spend their whole life connected to a parish and then find themselves without a community. Well, he loves this community, and we certainly love him. As a result, we should be seeing him pray with us more often. If you want to welcome him with a note or a hug or whatnot, I’m sure that would make him happy.
So…there we are! God bless you all. I’m so grateful to Jesus that I get to be your priest.
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