Your Love Has Given Us Life

Dear Sisters and Brothers –

On, Mother’s Day, we celebrate our mothers and step-mothers, our grandmothers and godmothers, any and all whose love for us has given us life, bound our wounds, celebrated our achievements, forgiven our wrongs, lit our paths, and given us reasons to hold onto hope and life with joy. We honor those women whose love for us has been a metaphor for God’s own love for us.

One of my favorite poets, Methodist pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes writes about this:

Aside from the sappy cards, the funny cards,
the cheap and the heartfelt cards,
God, this is your day, Mother’s Day,
day for givers of life through womb or arms,
by breast or heart, with eyes or lap,
a day for weavers of families, providers of food,
and for those who could not but did anyway.
Without our knowing you are one of us:
you know what it is to offer
the strength of a heart ready for breaking,
for your flesh to not be your own,
to give and to watch unnoticed,
in pangs no less rending than birth;
what it is to weep, smiling, for your beloved
though they do not hear you
as you send them into the world.
You know the improbable confounding shadow,
the dark nut of loneliness in the loaf of joy
even in the work of love among the beloved.
You know what it is to guard your wisdom
for when your growing ones ask,
long before they will ask,
to let them yearn at times without comfort,
to hold your wounded little ones
and offer no magic but the holding.
You know what it is to have failed
to raise perfect children
and to think of them as perfect,
to have hoped for so much more
and to love them perfectly.
You know the long letting go
and the unbreakable bond
as we walk out on the sweet, umbilical earth.
Today you are one of us,
your arms around your brood, smiling,
even as we remember our moms,
forgetting you.

Thank you, our dear mothers and mother-figures, for the ways you have loved us. We pray God send you special blessings on this day. May you always deeply know of our love, our gratitude, and our admiration.

Our last Home4Dinner event for the year is next Sunday, May 19. Appropriately, it falls on Pentecost this year, the Solemnity when we celebrate the giving of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church. It is this very sense of Church and community that we seek to deepen through Home4Dinner. As a parish, we have invested in H4D a great many resources – thought and prayer, energy and time, human and financial. It is a priority for our parish, one way we are attempting to respond to the fundamental human desire to belong to God and to a community with depth and meaning. For this reason, I extend once again my Nana’s own “warm obligation” to come for Mass and a meal next Sunday: As part of being “a Bonfiglio” was to be around her Sunday dinner table once a month, so is participation in Home4Dinner part of being “a parishioner of St. Ignatius.” And bring a friend! Someone whom you think would have a good experience at St. Ignatius, someone who would love the sense of community, or the music, or the food, or the beauty of the church, or the … I look forward to seeing you and your friend(s) next weekend!

A quick word about the renovations. Most of the scaffolding has come down, revealing rust-free spires, repaired eaves, and new paint that literally gleams in the sun. Several have cautiously asked me about the terra cotta columns and pediments, noting that they don’t look very clean. Actually, they are much cleaner than a year ago, but they still bear the marks of age. The reason for this is the expert on historical renovations from Plant Construction Co. suggested a method that would clean the terra cotta as much as possible without doing any damage to them. I have also heard, “Father, I can see where they repaired the masonry.” In fact, those places on the church where the brick is obviously not original are repairs that were made decades ago. The new repairs made are difficult to pick out; a great deal of care was put into finding new bricks that matched the original bricks well. (One such repair is at the northwest corner of the church, to the right of the three north-facing windows, at the very corner, going from top to bottom. Can you pick it out?!)

Finally, congratulations to the children and youth of our parish who received their First Communion and were confirmed this past week! We are very happy for you and pray that the graces of these sacraments deepen within you always.

Oremus pro invicem.

Fr. Greg

 

Top photo: Two women talking. Pexels (cc)

Second photo: Refurbished stained glass windows being reinstalled.
Nano Visser