From the Pastor’s Desk,

The 2019–2020 school year has ended: summer has finally come, and it is time for a break—for teachers, staff, students, and parents. It’s been good year. It’s a time to end online learning. I am very proud of our teachers, our school staff, our students and our parents. To leave for spring break with the knowledge that they might not be returning for several weeks which turned into the rest of the year. There were problems off and on with the zooming, etc. but for the most part we never lost a beat. As I wrote before, the sadness is for all the end of the year activities, especially the graduations. And for myself and all our theater students, the loss of the spring musical, Newsies was extremely sad and depressing. One of the seniors I had baptized and worked with since first Holy Communion. For all of our teachers, whether at the high school or middle school level, it simply ended.
We have about three months to kick back, watch the flowers grow, and mow the grass. For many people, summer is the busiest time of the year, with so much packed into a short time period: vacations, soccer, baseball, dance, gymnastics, summer camps, but this summer it will be different, and perhaps that is not all bad. Many of the normal summer activities have either been postponed or cancelled. That leaves time for families to be families. We do not need to constantly be doing so many structured activities. We need to be family with one another, family somehow safely with church. As summer officially begins this week, with Memorial Day, make a resolution to take time to breathe and smell the roses.
Take the time to pray as a family. Take the time to be a family, to do things together and even to be bored once in a while. That helps all of us to exercise our creativity. So often our young people are in so many structured activities, that they do not learn to be creative or how to express themselves freely. It is from creativity of individuals that produce our artists, scientists, musicians, business people, and inventors of tomorrow.
For Catholic Christians, the celebration of the Eucharist is the center of our faith, because it is through the Eucharist that the Lord comes to us. Since the middle of March with our churches closed due to the pandemic, we have not been able to be a church family gathered together around the altar. Now as the churches are slowly opening, we know that Mass will not go back to the way it used to be, PLEASE BE SAFE. PLEASE USE HAND SANITZER AS YOU ENTER THE CHURCH. PLEASE WEAR A FACE MASK, IF NOT FOR YOURSELF DO SO FOR OTHERS. PLEASE SIT APART. When schools start in the fall, they will not go back to the way they were. Things are going to change until there is a vaccine for Cobvid-19. We can be angry, depressed, and cynical or we can look to God for the grace and strength to move forward. The choice is ours. Our need is to keep holy the Lord’s Day, taking the time out of our daily lives to gather around His Table with the family of God. That gathering and receiving of the Lord in the Eucharist is the heart of our faith and the honoring of the Third Commandment.
~Rev. Lewis Hejna