Pastor's Letter-- August 2, 2020

As busy as we are with so many things pulling us and pushing us, it is easy to get swept away in our lives. If we don't live our lives on purpose, we can end up living them on accident. Sometimes this can yield drastic consequences, like hiking without a compass and finding yourself lost. Our faith, and our unique vocation, is a compass that the Lord gives us. Our parish has been working on its compass - trying to discover the voice of God speaking over and through the noise to a deeper calling. Over the past year our parish staff has been working from a new mission statement, and the work from the past few months in our Next Generation Parishes program has given us a good final product to begin using as a guide for our parish. You may have seen it recently on our parish website:

Driven by the missionary zeal of St. Thérèse, the Lord anoints us to proclaim to the poor and broken the good news that Jesus calls us to abundant life in Him.

While these thirty-two words make a long sentence, we believe every phrase is essential to our mission. I would like to share a little of why these phrases are important.

First we can go to the core of the message. Our job as a church in the world is to bring the gospel to others, so that they may encounter the person of Jesus. Poverty and brokenness are not always so easy to see in the soul, as we often don't like admitting our weakness and need for God. The reality is we all are poor and broken, and we all have a savior who can make us healed and whole. Evangelization is a huge part of the survival of our church in a very post-Christian culture that is not hospitable to the life of faith. If we are not bringing the Lord to others, they may never have a chance to meet Him and thus continue until death in a life that is a quiet nightmare in a desolate wasteland. Jesus' life is abundant - not just the basic "biological" life (Greek 'bios') of earthly things and hedonistic ends, but the fuller life (Greek 'zoe') of God's divine life shared with us by Grace, and ultimately stretching into eternity and breaking through into our present. This life is only found "in Him" - "there is no other name under heaven by which we are saved." (Acts 4:12) All of us are called to be missionaries (evangelizers). Pope Francis reaffirmed this in Evangelii Gaudium, and it goes all the way back to Christ's great commission from Matthew 28, which was not just for the apostles but for all of us.

Shifting to the first phrase, our patroness was in fact named as the patron saint of the missions. A girl who spent her whole short life in the two cities of Alencon and Lisieux (outside one pilgrimage to Rome) had such a heart for bringing Jesus to the world that it could not be contained by the four walls of her Carmelite convent: "Jesus, my love. At last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and then I will be all things" (Story of a Soul). Thérèse also had a close pen-pal relationship with two French missionary priests, serving as a spiritual mother for them.

The anointing from the Lord (which we all received at Baptism and Confirmation) is a powerful reminder to the gift of the Holy Spirit that "drives" us as it "drove" Jesus and the apostles. Saint Paul's words also echo here: "the love of Christ impels us" (2 Cor. 4:15-21) It is also an allusion to the charismatic nature of our parish, which I foresee as something that will only grow, and will be an avenue for our evangelization efforts. Finally, the textual similarity to Isaiah 61 and Luke 4 reminds us of Jesus' mission that is now our own as Christians (literally "little anointed ones").

We are going to be looking more deeply into the various parts of this mission statement in the weeks ahead in our bulletin. I pray that this regular reflection allows us all to see more and more deeply the great mission that God has for this parish. The Lord wishes to do amazing things, but we have to do our part and go forward in faith with Him.

Come Holy Spirit! Saint Thérèse, pray for us!