From our Pastor’s heart 9/1/25
From this week through October, I will be writing about how we are beginning to unify our Parish Family through Partners in the Gospel. In late October, we will hold listening sessions to discuss “who we are” in our parish family. While we will be filling out some Archdiocesan demographic information at that time, this is also an opportunity for us to share with each other about our friendship with Christ and how we have seen it lived out in our own lives and in the life of our parish.
As I have prayed and discussed with the staff, my leadership team, and the Parish Family Advisory Council, I have noticed that there are three areas of focus that will help to unify our parish family around this friendship with the Lord that he invites each of us, and everyone in our parish boundaries to! As Catholics, we see the world in a particular way. Two pieces of wood perpendicularly arranged aren’t just a plus sign. There aren’t fish on the front of the altar at St. John Bosco because we live near the Puget Sound. A golden box in a sanctuary holds something much more important to us than money. If you have ever read a novel by a Catholic author like Flannery O’Connor or the sprawling sci-fi novel spanning nearly three thousand years called A Canticle for Leibowitz, you know that there are particular ways that these authors see the world because they see Jesus Christ. One of my favorite poems by the English Maryr Joseph Mary Plunkett describes this ‘Catholic imagination’ beautifully:
“I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are, but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.”
For those of us with glasses, we know that lenses help us see the world more clearly. For some, they can help us avoid seeing double and focus on one thing correctly. Our eyes themselves are simply biological lenses that allow our souls to take in visual information, which our human intellect then sorts properly. Cataract surgery helps to clean the lens. Lenses help us focus.
As we have prayed together in the last year, what has come up in my own prayer and after consultation is that we focus with three lenses on the life of Faith in our Parish Family. Jesus Christ loves us and wants to be in an intimate, concrete friendship with each and every person within our parish boundaries. Our responsibility as Catholics in Lakewood and beyond is to bring others into intimate friendship with Christ by joyfully adhering to the Catholic Faith—through true worship, the Sacraments, and a generous life of virtue. The three lenses that I, the staff, and the PFAC have been praying with and honing to help unify our new parish are: 1. Communing in the Lord’s beauty, 2. Evangelizing through catechesis, and 3. Embodying the Works.
In the coming weeks and into October, I will be writing about and preaching on these three lenses of our Christian life. To prepare for our listening sessions in October, please take a minute to fill out the demographic surveys that we will be sending out, and stay tuned!
