1. The Mass today was offered for the spiritual and emotional healing of all those who commit abuse (by Rosemary Brown).
2. As I've mentioned before, the Bishop will allow our Churches to open for private prayer starting Monday. We're not yet having public, open celebrations of the sacraments or devotions, but at least we can all visit our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. St. Anthony's in Bethel will be open all the time. St. Elizabeth's and OLA will be open for set hours, TBD.
3. Concerning the open Churches. The bishop asked to be mindful of safety protocols. Obviously, do not come if you are sick. Be mindful of spacing. Also, when you leave, please wipe down the area you prayed in with a Clorox wipe.
4. Speaking of which ... I have run out of Clorox wipes. I'm hoping that between all our people, we can find three containers to be donated, one for each church. Please email or call to let me know. The stores seem to be all out.
5. Finally, Mass sign ups are now wide open! Even if you signed up May 2 - 8, you may now sign up for May 9 - 15. Thanks for your patience and cooperation.
In today's Gospel, Jesus says that he is the way, the truth, and the life. I would like to focus on the last way he describes himself, the life. Jesus is life, and bestows life upon us. It makes me think of all those activities and people that we find "life-giving." Just today I had a class session (online!) for the MSJ students, which is something that I find very life-giving. It almost seems that I'm more alive when teaching the students. For different people, of course, the activities that they find life-giving are different, but we all have a few things that so engage us that we can best describe the experience as becoming more alive.
Jesus says he is the life. Everything that is truly life-giving ultimately stems from the alive one, from life itself. Just as everything in creation is a reflection of the creator, so too everything that legitimately delights us flows from the life-giving power of Our Lord. He is life, and outside of him nothing is alive. All of our most enlivening experiences are echoes of Jesus' own living abundance. He is most alive; his life spills over into the things he has made.
His bubbling life cannot be bottled up or pinned down. It cannot be dried up. Even death itself cannot hold down the living one. He rises up again, an unstoppable living force. And just as the little reflections of him in creation make us feel more alive, so too our reception of him spiritually and especially in the Eucharist make us be more alive.
He came so that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. He gives us this abundant life not only one-by-one, but also in the Church. The community of the Church itself shares in his irrepressible life. Allow me to conclude, then, by quoting Blessed Fulton Sheen at length on the irrepressible life of that Christ shares with his Church.
There emerges, then, from her history one great and wonderful lesson and it is this: Christ rose from the dead, not because He is man, but because He is God. The Church rises from the sepulcher in which violent hands or passing errors would inter her, not because she is human, but because she is Divine. Nothing can rise from the dead except Divinity. The world should profit by experience and give up expecting the Church to die. If a bell had been tolled on a thousand different occasions and the funeral never took place, men would soon begin to regard the funeral as a joke. So it is with the Church. The notice of her execution has been posted but the execution has never taken place. Science killed her and still she was there. History interred her, but still she was alive. Modernism slew her, but still she lived. Even civilizations are born, rise to greatness, then decline, suffer, and die; but they never rise again. But the Church does rise again; in fact she is constantly finding her way out of the grave because she had a Captain who found His way out of the grave. The world may expect her to become tired, to be weak when she becomes powerful, to become poor when she is rich, but the world need never expect her to die. The world should give up looking for the extinction of that which so many times has been vainly extinguished.
May we richly experience the risen power of Christ in our lives, who came to make us fully alive!