From the Pastor’s Desk::
As the joyous season of Easter has come, let us celebrate Christ breaking the bonds of death and coming back from the dead. In celebrating and living the fifty days of Easter I want to challenge each of us to a stronger prayer life. All of us, myself included need to spend more time in prayer, in communicating with our God. We need to shut off the televisions, radios, computers, tablets, cell phones and simply talk with God and not just at Easter or Christmas. Our God sent His Son to die for us, how often do we spend time in prayer?
The entire Season of Lent for the Ukrainian people was a time of true penance, sacrifice and death. They are experiencing the total destruction of their country: schools, homes, churches, businesses, factories, infrastructure and people. Our Lent was simple in comparison and our Easter is a time of joy and thankfulness. So be careful that you/we do not complain about the high cost of gasoline, food in the stores, or waiting for weeks for something we have ordered. With the destruction of the Ukraine, the wheat supply especially along with other grains are going to be affected for the world. Steel production is going to be affected. The Ukraine was a modern, industrial and agricultural country and all of that is gone, plus millions being made homeless along with thousands killed.
The world that we have been living in since the fall of the Soviet Union 31 years ago has changed in the last 55 days. It may never be the same. St. Paul wrote to the Romans almost 2,000 years ago that as disciples of Jesus we must “not be conformed to this world,” “but be transformed by the renewal of our minds”. In order to be citizens of heaven, we must be detached from the noise and chaos of the world, but we need to participate fully in cultural, political and public life. In other words I believe St. Paul was/is telling us to detach ourselves from the news cycles, social media arguments which inflame our anger, or provoke our anxiety and shift our focus from God to the temporal. At the same time we are not to “bury” our heads in the sand. We have the responsibility to know and understand what is happening in our world and work to make the world a better place to live.
During this Easter Season let us truly become a people of prayer, thanking God for the gift of His Son and asking God that peace be restored in Eastern Europe. This is not a onetime prayer that we say or ask and then move on to the next thing. Our God is an unchanging and ever-loving God who moves in His time not ours. Silent prayer and contemplation for only a few minutes each week/day before the Blessed Sacrament can calm our hearts and renew our minds and place our troubled world before our God.