Greetings in Christ, all! Are you ready for a crazy one? Next Sunday is Palm Sunday! Wow…this Lent is moving along.
We’ve got updates this week, so let’s get after it…First, our new building. If you haven’t noticed, Morgan Construction is moving our new building right along. They are an amazing company who are doing great work for us and I’m so impressed by their work ethic, their employees, and, best of all? They are a big part of our parish family. When will it be done? It’s tough to tell, obviously. Weather this time of year makes a building schedule a bit unpredictable. The hope is that in May or June, we move in. One thing I’ll definitely be doing is asking for every single person who can help us move all our stuff from Outreach and Maintenance over to the new building. If we all pull the rope together, it’ll be done quickly.
Next, the organ. So, this one is tough, too. The company doing this work is very busy and very in demand and definitive answers are a bit harder to get. At this point, we are gunning for having it all in and ready to rock before Christmas. With the installation, there will be other decorative elements that will go up and I’m excited about those as well. In the place where the organ pipes currently are in the gathering area, we will have a beautiful display of the 12 apostles. We ordered those statutes and assume a 10-month creation period. They will be hand-carved in Italy by the same good people who made our St. Mary and St. Joseph statues. I am ridiculously excited about this.
Two last notes for this week…Please make Holy Week the highest priority for you and your family. Our services on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter weekend are the biggest celebrations in the Catholic church. I do not think you will regret making time for this holiest of celebrations. We have the schedule for you in this bulletin.
On a final note, I want to express my great thanks to all the ladies of our parish who have been helping with meals for our new moms. I was informed that our three new moms who asked for help received 18 meals, thanks to your generosity and hard work. I’m so blessed by you.
This week’s homilies will focus on The Corporal Work of Mercy: “Bury the Dead.” We will look at how our Christian faith asks us to deal with death: funerals, burials, etc. You might end up hearing things that the Church asks of us that you have not done. Please let it go. You can only act on what you know. Part of the reason we will share these things with you is so that you know how the Church teaches we should respond to death because it seems that we American Catholics may have “lost the plot” about what a funeral is for and why we pray it.
Like all the homilies during Lent, this one is challenging and I hope you are not feeling worn down by these challenges. I hope it stirs up in each of us the instinct for battle, the knowledge that we are created to be a certain way, to live a specific type of life. As Pope Benedict stated, “The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”
I love you all and thank Jesus that He lets me be your priest.
Fjk