Greetings in Christ! I pray that God is blessing your summer days with joy, peace and life-giving times with family. I wanted to take this time to give you a couple important updates.
First, please note that both Father Dan and I are going away for retreat. We are not going together; we simply discovered that we had set our retreats for the exact same time. Crazy, no? I will be leaving Sunday after confessions and I will be returning the next week. Please pray for Fr. Dan and me. This will hopefully be a time of rest and rebuilding for both of us.
The second update might seem a little odd, but stick with me. This update pertains to clothes, of all things!
There are two types of clothes I tend to wear as a priest that might not be what you are used to seeing. One is called the cassock which I tend to wear it in my daily life; and the other is called a fiddleback, the vestment I tend to wear at Mass.
Both types of garments are clothes that I would choose because they are much cooler in the summer and they are easy to take on and off.
A cassock is a long, black robe with a white collar. It’s what I usually wear instead of clerics, which are the black pants, shirt and white collar you are used to seeing. A fiddleback vestment is similar to the ones you usually see a priest wearing at Mass, except it does not have sleeves and it’s much lighter.
When I spoke to Fr. Dan, he prefers to wear these clothes too! So, you may see us walking about in our cassocks and praying Mass in our fiddleback vestments!
So, there it is. I am settling in nicely and very much looking forward to my time of retreat. I will pray for you every day and ask that you pray for me as well.
Celebrate God’s Love for you!
Fjk