As I write this eBulletin I am at Zephyr Point Presbyterian Retreat Property for the annual San Jose Diocesan Youth Retreat (DYR). It is a beautiful place but what is even more beautiful is the experience that happens here with the youth. They experience the love of Christ in ways that they never have before! 250 youth and 60+ youth leaders are here from all over the diocese. I have been coming to this retreat for the 24 years of my priesthood and have only missed a few over the years. It gives me great hope for the future of our Church to not only witness 250+ students experience a powerful retreat but also to witness the faith of the youth leaders themselves that come back year after year to help put this retreat on. The youth truly have a transformative experience that enables God’s grace to heal their wounds, ease their stresses, and give them reason to believe in God’s love in the world. Please pray that they get to bring this love and faith back to their homes and schools and bring life, love, and joy into our Churches again.
Speaking of love and joy, thank you to all the parishioners who came to say thank you and bid farewell to Sr. Mary-Han and Fr. Thuc at all the Masses last Sunday. It is bittersweet to say goodbye but at the same time to be grateful for the gifts they have shared with us over the last many years. We wish them well in their new parishes and I ask you to pray for them as they transition to their new assignments.
I mentioned at all the Masses the importance of acknowledgement of grief at this time. It is natural and healthy to experience grief in losing them as they have been an integral part of our ministry and community for these 5-7 years. I recently read something about grief that I found helpful. Grief is an undirected energy that enables us to transition through a loss in our life. We need to acknowledge it and direct this energy in a healthy way. If we ignore it or pretend that we do not experience grief, then that undirected energy will take its toll on us internally in sometimes random ways, even manifest itself physically. If, however, we acknowledge its reality and direct this energy towards needed changes to adapt the new reality, then it will transform us into stronger versions of ourselves. So, let’s acknowledge our grief at this time and allow this energy to spur us to new development in our community. Fr. Thuc is now taking some vacation before his new assignment begins on July 1st and he has written you a message here.
As we head into the summer months, I wanted to give you a snapshot of the year ahead for us. We will be finalizing the plans over the next few weeks with our new staff members, but I wanted to give you a brief overview of some of the offerings. We are still discerning the final theme for the year, but it will be something like “BE STILL” in the presence of God.
Over the last few years, we have offered many different retreat sessions about how to pray and develop a habit of prayer in our daily lives. We have weaved many other subject matters such as welcoming others with a smile, forgiveness, death & dying, and listening with the heart. After hearing from many of you, there seems to be a clear desire to go deeper into this listening with the heart to God in our lives. Most of us have little practice with this form of prayer often called contemplative prayer and which I call Level-4 prayer where we learn to just sit with God and be still. So, over the next year we will focus much of retreat offerings around this subject and help you to move towards this level of prayer while at the same time offering people access and tools to all levels of prayer.
In the hyper functional and productive world that we live in Silicon Valley, sometimes prayer can be seen as wasting time. Just being still and doing nothing for a few moments seems foolish because we are trained to squeeze efficacy and effectiveness out of every minute of our day. We are made to feel that we need to get more done and be more efficient in what we do. I do not object to efficiency or effectiveness per se but when it drives us to allow no time to “just be”, then it is a sign that we need to slow down and take in the present moments. Life is so precious and shorter than we can ever imagine so we often need reminders that we need to slow down and enjoy the gift of the present moment.
Unfortunately, it often takes an illness to us or a loved one, to make us slow down and take in the gift of life. But even then, the momentum of our ambient culture drives us to go back to full pace. I am not exempt from this temptation and find myself doing the same thing even with good things of ministry. It doesn’t really matter with what we are so busy! If we don’t have the time to drink in the gift of life and the love of God, then we are not living life to the fullest in the way God had intended. Would you say that spending some time with your spouse in silence just being in each other’s company is a waste of time? No. Of course, that is what people who love one another do—spend time being present to one another!
Contemplative prayer is a way to slow us down and waste some time with God. It is a way to pay attention to the love we share with our God without any need for action or words. Just be still. It is a good thing to do and to ignore being effective or efficient for a few moments and pay attention to God’s love in our lives. I know this is certainly counterculture! Contemplative prayer moves us to love others because we become grateful for the gift of life and want to share that gift with others, but we do that only after our own cups are full. This will take some learning for all of us and so we will commit our year ahead to guiding each other in this endeavor.
For now, I ask you to hold the weekend of October 25th – 27th for our second annual St. Simon Parish Retreat. We will again turn the whole campus into a retreat center and ask you to spend the weekend with us on campus learning different forms of prayer. We will nourish with meals, have beautiful music and outdoor activities to accompany us in our prayer. It will be a special weekend. We will also offer the Spiritual Exercises in the 19th annotations format starting in October through May. This will be announced in detail next weekend at all Masses. During Advent, we will offer a prayer series on Tuesday evenings and in Lent we are planning a 3-night Lenten retreat with a guest speaker. Throughout the year we will also sprinkle in sessions on specific topics targeted at segments of our community. All of this is to say that we will align our offerings to help us all be more attentive to God’s love in our lives!
This weekend, we celebrate the love of our fathers and those who act as fathers to us. We will have a meditation song as well as a small gift for those fathers present at all Masses. Please come to Church and let’s bless our fathers together.
At the Sunday 11:15am Mass, we will have a special guest presider, Cardinal Stephen Chow, Archbishop of Hong Kong, and brother of parishioner Stan Chow. It will be an honor to host him briefly here at St. Simon Parish. He has been here all week with a full schedule visiting the Chinese communities throughout the Bay Area and encouraging them in their evangelizing efforts among the Chinese communities. Come and join us for a great weekend of ministry.
God Bless,
Fr. Brendan