News - March 2019

I am a great admirer of Gerhard Lohfink and read, reflected on and prayed over his recent book on the Our Father. (Liturgical Press, 2019, 119 pages). It is truly a very fresh take on a prayer we have all prayed so many times and leads us, I think, to pray it in a new and even startling fresh way. Lohfink learned a great deal from his brother, Norbert about Jesus’ use of the Old Testament in formulating the prayer. It was a prayer for Jesus’s disciples. Matthew introduces it in his Sermon on the Mount and Luke places it after one of Jesus’s disciples asks him to teach them how to prayer. So, the prayer is primarily for Jesus’ disciples. The Our Father is pure petition—not filled with praise as were so many Jewish prayers. Unlike those Jewish prayers filled with doxologies of praise, the Our Father is like a cry, begging that God would intervene in our world. It is also a very short prayer. The Jewish Tefillah has more than 1,300words and the Matthew version of the Our Father has only fifty-five words and Lukes’s version only 23 words.

This week our bulletin carries two more essays from fellow parishioners, their testimonies for why they are Roman Catholic.  It has been gratifying for me to hear from our essayists the thanks and the feedback they are receiving: “Thank you. You have given me so much to think about,”

This week we continue our Lenten series “Why I Am Catholic.”  As two more of our fellow parishioners share with us this week a bit of how God is working in their lives, we are all invited to notice and articulate for ourselves how God is working in ours.

Job Title: Administrator for Marriages, Baptisms and Funerals Job Type: Non-exempt, part-time position (approximately 25 hours per week)

Job Title: Director of Parish Faith Formation (Adult and Youth) Existing Position (this position was created in July 2016)

This first Sunday of Lent, Jesus heads into the desert.  Luke’s gospel seems to indicate that it was for the purpose of being tempted by the devil.  While I believe that happened, I don’t think that was the reason Jesus went.  Rather, he went for the same reason you and I would attend a retreat–to get away from the ordinary and most-often important demands on our time and attention and spend some special time with God.

I could not, literally, put down Tara Westover’s memoir which I read in a day and half. It was, of course, a long-time best-seller on the New York Times list for 2018. As one commentator noted of the book, it was “ a punch to the gut, a slow burn, a savage indictment and a love letter. . Rarely have I read a book that made me so uncomfortable, so enraged, and at the same time so utterly, entirely absorbed.”

On Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we begin our 40-day Lenten journey to the Sacred Triduum and Easter marked by the three ancient disciplines of the season: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  (Be sure to take a Catholic Relief Services Rice Bowl, to collect the alms saved from that Starbucks cup of coffee or whatever it is from which you’ll fast!  We’ll collect those for you at the end of Lent.)