Living, Dying, and Rising

Dear Friend,

At a gathering of parish and Mission staff members this past week, our friar Guardian, Brother Mark, invited us to pause and reflect.  He asked us to bring into focus our experience of the great dynamic of life – living, dying, and rising. For Christians and certainly for those connected to the tradition of St. Francis and St. Clare, these three words point us to Jesus Christ who invited his disciples to enter living, dying, and rising as a revelation of love embedded in the deepest core of all reality, from the beginning.     

We hear in the Gospel this week: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies it produces much fruit.” LIFE, the great theme of the Gospel of John, is something to which we are summoned, just as Lazarus is summoned out of his tomb in the dramatic climax of Jesus’s ministry as John presents it. (We will hear that text proclaimed this Sunday at the 11am Mass, as Chuck completes his scrutiny preparation for Baptism at the Easter Vigil in two short weeks!) 

The two great saints we celebrated this last week, St. Patrick and St. Joseph, offer us models of what living, dying, and rising look like when the call to love is answered whole-heartedly. As we prayerfully acknowledge our communion with Joseph and Patrick and with all the saints this weekend, we can call to mind the loss of so many lives in our time of pandemic over the last year.  Our scriptures prepare us to hear and see and enter what Jesus will dramatize in Holy Week.  This summons to love and life could not be timelier.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor