From our Pastor’s Heart 9/7/25

For many of us, our Christian life and friendship with Christ is pretty ordinary. The author Robert Hugh Benson, in his book Friendship of Christ, put it this way about Catholics. “It is at once the privilege and the burden of Catholics that they know so much of Jesus Christ. It is their privilege, since an intelligent knowledge of the Person and the attributes and the achievements of the Incarnate God is an infinitely greater wisdom than all the rest of the sciences put together. To have a knowledge of the Creator is incalculably a more noble thing than to have a knowledge of His Creation. Yet it is a burden as well; for the splendor of this knowledge may be so great as to blind us to the value of its details...Indeed, one of the most remarkable facts in the Catholic Religion is the manner in which this is almost instinctively done by persons who perhaps have never deliberately meditated upon the reason of their action.” We go to Mass, we frequent the Sacraments, we go to catechism as kids, and we might even learn more about God through continuing formation. We teach our children their prayers, and even pray ourselves. But we might not have the words when someone asks us about this friendship to be able to share Him with others. The goal of the lenses of communing in the Lord’s beauty, evangelizing through catechesis, and embodying the works, is to give us lenses to focus and sharpen our vocabulary of our Faith, both individually and together as a Parish Family – to see the areas we have in common in our life of Faith and thus in this clarity to move forward in proposing that friendship to those around us who might not know of Christ and the beauty that He gives to us and the world in the Church. 

The first and most important lens from which everything else flows is our communing in the Lord’s beauty. This is first and foremost is the Christian Life of Prayer, Meditation, Sacraments, & Worship.  I’m a little bit of a word nerd. Communing comes from the Latin “to be in a deep unity with.” We as Catholics probably think of this word when we think about Holy Communion. The Lord reaches out in friendship to us!  He wants to have deep unity with us and provide us with both internal and external means to do so. This is what the disciples did for three years before the Lord ever sent them out to the nations to evangelize. To me, communing means to adhere to the Lord in the life of prayer. He wants to speak to my heart like yours, and He wants to share his deep and personal union with His Father with me and through Him in the unity of the Holy Spirit.  There is a good word for this in Spanish that doesn’t translate as well into English: para convivir. Roughly translated, it means to live together. This is what the Lord wants with us – to commune – to live with Him here, and forever.