From the Pastor’s Desk

By Fr. Terry Kerner

I have not deserted you! I am home but restricted in my activities and required to rest as well as “enjoy” the physical therapy to build stamina. Breathing is still a challenge but seems to be improving as we go along. In the weeks ahead I will be concluding the anti-biotic regimen then enjoy a couple of blood tests prior to an internal examination of the heart. (For our medical professionals in the parish the procedure is call a “TEE”.) Every step along the way I have appreciated and felt the need for your prayerful support. So many of you have demonstrated this over the past couple of months and I want to believe that you have helped me to get to this point in recovery. My thanks also for your kind wishes for my birthday last Sunday. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would to turn seventy-six!

I want to encourage all of us to keep our faith alive and joyful looking for ways the parish can sustain us. There are a few activities and celebrations approaching that we can share in months ahead — contact sports are not on the list!

Have good week and enjoy this beautiful time of year.

The Deacon Is “Speakin”

By Rev. Mr. Thomas Leonard

Abandoning Ourselves to God, Part 2 of 3

In our last “The Deacon is ‘Speakin’” we spoke of how man can view God as a rival who curtails our freedom and thus, we cannot be fully human until we have cast Him aside.  God’s love, which can seem to be untrustworthy, creates a dependence and man feels he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. 

However, love is not dependence but a gift that makes us alive.  It gives us the freedom to live for God and for others.  Because our freedom is that of a limited human being, dependent upon God and others, our freedom is a shared freedom.  Only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop.  We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth of our being, and that is, in accordance with God’s will.

For God’s will is not a law for the human being imposed on him from outside, like some sort of cosmic thumb forcing itself upon man and restraining him.  Rather, God’s law springs up from within us “to do good and avoid evil”; “to do to others only what you’d have them do to you”, or that “two ‘wrongs’ don’t make a ‘right.’”  It’s this law engraved within man that makes him the image of God, capable of consciously and purposely laying down his life for others and God.           

If we live in opposition to love and against truth – in opposition to God – then we destroy one another and destroy the world.  Then we do not find life but act in the interests of death. 

Due to the continuing “effects” of original sin, we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring and that something is missing from his life: the dramatic dimension of being autonomous, testing our freedom, even in opposition to love. In a word, thinking that evil is basically good, even necessary, to experience life to the full. The Virgin Mary would beg to differ.

Next week we conclude Pope Benedict XVI’s thought on “Abandoning Ourselves to God.”