August
26,
2010
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St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Parish is here for you. Sunday Mass is at 12:00 noon at St Francis of Assisi Independent Catholic Chapel: 195 Ridgewood Avenue Glen Ridge, NJ. Please call the parish office to arrange for the sacraments and please join us at our weekly mass. President: Br. Anthony, (n)FCMVice-Presdient: Jane Postel Treasurer: Robert Johnson Secretary: Br. Geety, (n)FCM Education Committe Chair: Heidi Development Committee: Kathy, Jane and Steven Pastoral Care Committee: ToniMarie, Dorothy “So
that none
might be Lost.”  22nd
Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
August 29, 2010 OPENING PRAYER Let us pray to God
who invites everyone to his Kingdom (pause) Our Father, you who lift up the lowly; your Son Jesus came into our world as the servant of all and he cherished the helpless. With him, make us respect and appreciate the weak, the defenseless, and the humble and accept to be numbered among them. Dispose us to help them and to seek their help. For you have poured out your mercy on us too through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen MEDITATION: Struggling
with Our Own Inadequacy
Greetings
and
Peace!“For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk 14:11). It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments we admit this. Rarely is there a day when we could not echo these words by Anna Blaman: I realized that it was
simply impossible for a human being to be and remain good or pure. If,
for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only
be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing,
it left another in the cold. No day and no hour go by without my being
guilty of inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well
enough done, except being inadequate, which we are good at because that
is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else. Every
day and every hour brings with it its weight of moral guilt, as regards
my work and my relations with others. I am constantly catching myself
out in my human failings and, in spite of their being implied in my
human imperfection, I am conscious of a sort of check. And this means
that my human shortcomings are also my human guilt. It sounds strange
that we should be guilty where we can do nothing about it. But even
where there is no set purpose, no deliberate intention, we have a
conviction of our own shortcomings, and of consensual guilt, a guilt
which shows itself all too clearly in the consequences of what we have
done or left undone.
Henri Nouwen occasionally expressed similar feelings: There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives. When we are in touch with ourselves, we can relate to these words, these expressions of inadequacy. At the end of the day, we cannot measure up and cannot not disappoint others and ourselves. Generally the fault is not that we are not sincere or that we do not put out the effort. The fault is that we are human. We have limited resources, get tired, experience feelings we cannot control, have only 24 hours in our day, have too many demands on us, have wounds and weaknesses that shackle us, and thus know exactly what St. Paul meant when he said: Woe, to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing! That may sound negative, neurotic, and stoic, and it can be those things, but, appropriated properly, it can generate hope and renewed energy in our lives. To be human is to be inadequate, by definition. Only God is adequate and the rest of us can safely say to ourselves: Fear not you are inadequate! But a God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with this. Personally, I take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who, while waiting for the bridegroom, all fell asleep, wise and the foolish alike. Even the wise were too human and too weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy, can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even to a healthy humor about it. But it should bring us to something more: prayer, especially the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. A biblical scholar, Gerhard Lofink, puts it this way: The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ's return. They gathered in Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return. I try to celebrate Eucharist every day. I do this because I am a priest and part of the covenant a priest makes with the church at his ordination is to pray the priestly prayer of Jesus, the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, regularly for the world. But I do it too, more personally, for another reason: The older I get, the less confident, in some ways, I am becoming. I don't always know whether I'm following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ, and so I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this, if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return. Fr. Ron Rolheiser Hello Everyone and
Peace!
Hard to believe summer is coming to an end, that this is the last Sunday in August! Harder yet to believe is that we are going back to school. We had a busy summer season and I so appreciate all your dedication in getting to Mass on Sundays to worship as a parish community, thank you. We had several baptisms, a couple of weddings in our parish: Brandan and Francillia, Karen and Ivan. Congratulations! We started a choir, began our Holy Groundz weekly discussions at Café Eclectic, clothed our Novices, admitted Br. Geety Reyes, (n)FCM into Candidacy for Holy Orders, began providing Sunday Mass to Essex County jail, celebrated GLBTQ Pride at Asbury Park and Jersey City, elected a new parish council, drafted constitutions for the parish, created Foundation House as our charitable arm as a parish of the American National Catholic Church, began our educational program for preparing the children of the parish for their sacraments and came together for our second annual parish picnic at the friary. Wow, what a Summer! The Fall and Winter promises to be just as busy. We are hoping to begin an evening Mass and Scripture Study on alternate Tuesday nights, and have Holy Groundz on the other Tuesday evenings, Parish Advent Retreat, Healing Mass Celebration Of Midnight Mass, have a Casino Night fund raiser in February for our Foundation House charitable activities at Christmas, develop our pastoral care ministries to local skilled nursing facilities, and… I want to take this opportunity to thank the outgoing parish council for all their hard work and support of the parish over the last two years. Stephanie, Tracey, Bill, and Mark all did a tremendous job in helping establish the parish and lay the foundation for our future growth. Please join me in thanking them for their hard work. Join me in welcoming our new council as they begin their tenure as our servant leaders: President- Br. Anthony Bevilaqua (n) FCM, Vice-President- Jane Postel, Treasurer- Robert Johnston, Secretary- Br. Geety Reyes, (n) FCM. We have also created several committees in accord with our constitutions: Fundraising Committee Chairperson- Kathy, Pastoral Care Committee Chairpersons Toni Marie and Dorothy, and Liturgy Committee Chairperson Br. Anthony, Education Committee chairperson: Heidi. We need a chairperson for our Outreach Committee for our efforts to Ali Fornay Center, etc. As many of you may know Toni-Marie and Dorothy are making a Pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in October. They have offered to carry to Lourdes a book containing any petitions you may want to address to Our Lady’s intercession. The Petition Book will be available at Mass beginning this Sunday. Please inscribe your prayers and petitions before the Offertory and it will be carried in procession with all the gifts which are to be transformed by God’s love. Br. Geety has finally uploaded the videos for the Investiture Mass last July 28th. If you want to check it out, click on the links to the videos below: Please Mark Your Calendars:
Let us Pray: Let those who are the last and the least in the eyes of people, be first in our prayers to the Father. Let us say: R/ Lord, come and save us. Lord, in our world the powerful are honored and the humble are looked down upon. Remember the humble, we pray: R/ Lord, come and save us. Lord, in our world the poor become poorer and the rich become richer. Remember the destitute and the needy, we pray: R/ Lord, come and save us. Lord, in our homes many sick people, the old and the weak and the lonely, are often neglected and abandoned. Remember all those who suffer, we pray: R/ Lord, come and save us. In many countries, ours included, there are many homeless and refugees who have no stone upon which to lay their head. Remember all of them, Lord, we pray: R/ Lord, come and save us. Many children and old people have only the street to live and to sleep on; also many prisoners are forgotten. Remember all of them, Lord, we pray: R/ Lord, come and save us. There are people for whom nobody prays, and there are those who hurt and afflict us. Remember them, Lord, we pray: R/ Lord, come and save us. Lord, you listen, to the prayers of those who trust in you. Help us to remember with you the least of our brothers and sisters. We ask this through Christ our Lord. R/ Amen. OTHER LINKS:
Blessings, |
| Independent Catholic Community of Saint Francis of Assisi Mission |
visit
our website (www.stfrancisnj.org)
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A parish community of the American National Catholic Church Jurisdiction |
973-731-7765
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