I welcome my brother priest from Saint Vincent Archabbey to Holy Cross this weekend as I am beginning my third year as Pastor of Holy Cross on vacation. Yes, August 18 begins my third year, and what a blessing you have all been to me! Let us petition the Holy Spirit to make laughter a gift of the Holy Spirit!
In Biblical times, before the advent of fast food and lone dining, people ate around a common table. With whom you ate was just as important as what you ate. You didn’t sit down to dinner with just anybody. You ate with family. You ate with people who embraced your laws and customs. If you invited a stranger to your table you were implicitly offering not only a meal but shelter, protection and extended family status, and once you did, it was more or less for keeps. In our eat-and- run culture, we no longer intuitively accept that meals are a kind of covenant. The family dinner table is not what it used to be. It doesn’t bind us each to each. Burgers shared out of a bag in the car from front seat to back is not quite the same thing. To appreciate the ramifications of covenant belonging implicit in a meal, we have to reach beyond to our holy-day tables, where insiders and outsiders are still defined and being there still means something. Absenting ourselves from that table is still a deliberate and telling decision. When we come forward at Mass to receive Holy Communion, we are choosing a shared life: with rich history, a responsible present, and an oriented future.
Next weekend, August 25 and 26, we will offer a special blessing upon all who will be returning to school: teachers, administrators, students and support staff.
This week we celebrate the lives of some very special saints:
- Monday - Saint Bernard: May we learn from him that “real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining passing pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us.”
- Tuesday - Saint Pius X: Like him, may we seek always to "restore all things in Christ."
- Wednesday - the Queenship of Mary: May we always love, serve and honor Mary our Queen.
- Thursday - St. Rose of Lima: Like her, let us pray, “Lord, increase you love in my heart.”
- Friday - St. Bartholomew, the Apostle: May we imitate his desire to be with Jesus and continue the mission of Jesus without seeking notoriety.
Our Responsorial Psalm this week, "Create a clean heart in me, O God," reminds us to humble ourselves before the Lord and to pray for God to renew our spirit.
