Heartfelt Gratitude

Dear Friend,

Peace and all good be yours!

Thanks to all of you who took the time to join our virtual town hall gathering last weekend. These events will continue as it becomes important to update everyone about upcoming events, changes, and current issues that affect us all as a community of faith. The goal is the full, conscious, active engagement of all members of the parish in every dimension of the discipleship we share in our Franciscan tradition.  

I offer my heartfelt gratitude to our pastoral council members, our finance council members, our family ministry team, and to all volunteers who have given so generously to our outdoor liturgies and to our outreach and service to the greater Santa Barbara community.

I offer my special thanks to our colleagues, Monica Orozco and Suzy Plott, for all the planning and complicated logistics they brought together in providing us with the Mission Speaker Series that concluded last week. For many, the series was an eye-opener. Taken together, our speakers presented the history of race and ethnicity in California as the unique interplay of economic and legal structures, spirituality and religion, labor, culture, and politics, all shaped by human actors – all too fallible and often heroic – into a narrative at once remarkable and disturbing. The series could not have happened without the gifts that Monica brings us as Executive Director of the Mission, along with Suzy who stewards the Mission’s community development and outreach.

On the cover of this week’s bulletin we commemorate a singular contribution of our own to California history: a communal journey of two hundred years since the rebuilding of the Mission church celebrated in September of 1820. As we face our many current challenges – financial and otherwise - this week’s Gospel reminds us that God’s generosity can triumph, as it dares us to let our own thinking be turned  upside down.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm