On Tuesday nights at 7:00 pm, we continue the retreat on Living the Eucharist: Circle of Life. This week, we went through the second movement of the Eucharist about the Liturgy of the Word. We walked through the critical elements of this movement and how God comes at us in the four different scripture passages: 1st Reading, Responsorial Psalm, the 2nd Reading and the Gospel. Scripture tells us the story of God’s love for his creation and how he created us in his own image and while we failed time and time again to return his love. God keeps loving us till this day. The priest in his homily then tries to weave the story of God’s love for us from all the scripture readings into the story of our lives.
The challenge I gave everyone was to prepare better for this movement by reading the Sunday readings at home each week. I know that most Catholics do not read the bible much but we need to move beyond our stereotype history and start to read and study the bible, especially the gospels. If we are only listening to the readings on Sunday as our only access to the Word of God, then we are only giving God 10 minutes out of 10,080 minutes each week (less than 0.1% of our time) and that is just not good enough! If we truly believe that God speaks through the Word of God then we need to leave a little more room in our week for his Word.
Next week, I will connect this movement of God love’s coming at us to the next movement of Liturgy of the Eucharist which is our response and us going to God with our gratitude and love. I encourage you to join me on Tuesday night at 7pm as I break open the movement of the Liturgy of the Eucharist and look at ways to engage more meaningfully in this critical component of the Eucharist, most often considered the words of consecration. But this movement is so much more than what happens to the elements of the bread and wine, but what happens to us when we consume Christ. Come and join me.
Again I remind everyone to mark your calendars for November 13-14 for a weekend of beautiful music. Please join us in hosting nationally renowned Catholic composer and musician, John Angotti. The highlight of the weekend will be an Angotti Concert in the Courtyard on Sunday afternoon, (2-4pm) November 14. I invite you to come to this social event modeled after the Fall BBQ and bring the whole family. Everyone can bring their own food and wine. John is particularly gifted with working with children and will engage the children in familiar songs and teach them some new ones. It will be a great afternoon and we encourage you to join us for this major community building event. We need to get together and celebrate who we are!
This week, all the priests of the diocese gather for their annual retreat. Every year, every priest is asked to take a week retreat to refocus our relationship with Christ. Most of us have not taken a retreat over this pandemic period and we are all desperately in need to come to Christ in a deeper way. It has been a hard 2 years for all of us and priests are no different. This year the Bishop asked us to take this retreat together and all 100 priests will be meeting at the Jesuit Retreat House here in Los Altos. It will be a special time as we all gather together. In my 21 years of priesthood, I have never seen all of us gather together for our annual retreat and it is my hope is that we all fall in love with Jesus again and be renewed in our ministry to serve the people of the County of Santa Clara again.
Unfortunately, the retreat house cannot accommodate all the priests and those of us who live close by have been asked to sleep in our parishes and commute to the retreat house each day. While not ideal, we still look forward to spending this time in prayer and we promise to pray for all our parishioners and ask you to please pray for all of us. We will only celebrate Mass at 6:30 am each day before we go to the retreat house and we will livestream that Mass so those at home can watch it any time during the day. Again, please pray for us as we pray for you while we are on retreat.
God Bless,
Fr. Brendan