A Parish’s Distinctive Task

Dear Friend,

Our Lenten calendar of activity went out last week and several people have approached me to let me know they’d seen it and were studying it for how to connect with what activities, appreciative of the options available.

In conversation with the Pastoral Council this week, I would like to highlight one Lenten event in which your participation would be especially important in helping leadership focus and articulate the direction of our parish. On Saturday, March 25th, Father Michael Blastic will be coming to the parish via ZOOM, to open a conversation with crucial implications for our parish priorities. Why does St. Barbara Parish matter at all in the life of our community, so filled as it is with many options to join communities, churches, organizations and clubs? With our long - and fraught - Franciscan roots, what does it mean to evangelize today? Is it even possible? Do we have anything special to offer the community of Santa Barbara? What is it? 

All this is very much in line with this Sunday’s Gospel text. Jesus calls us to a distinctive task, something different from “the pagans”: namely, loving like our “heavenly Father who makes his sun rise on the bad and the good”. Does our parish life help us carry that out? How? And in the second reading, St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, uses language about foolishness that St. Francis picked up when he named his own call as being “a fool such as the world has never seen before.” Is that who we are as a community?  

These questions are challenging for any community that takes its discipleship seriously in light of history and current events. Please mark your calendars for March 25th, the feast of the Annunciation (no coincidence)!

Gratefully

Father Dan OFM, Pastor