Beginning this Monday (11th) the new Mass schedule will go into affect. Without Fr. Ross’ presence we need to readjust the times during the week and weekend. Not what either Fr Ross or I expected at this time, and with any consideration about Mass times, the schedule is not perfect.

Just a week into summer vacation, waking up and heading downstairs for breakfast, this eleven year old was pulled aside by his mother.  Not for some discipline or punishment (though I surely deserved anything coming my way), but to call my attention to the breaking news on TV: the sudden death of a well known family man and Senator. 

Fr. Clem Currans died last Saturday and the Mass of Christian Burial was held on Wednesday at Immaculate Conception Church in Graettinger.  Fr. Currans served Sacred Heart Parish from 1998 to 2005, known for his Irish heritage, salvaging that which can be later used, inspiring Deacon David Brown’s diaconate, creating a pastoral assistant position, and guiding individuals and families to the Eucharist. 

“Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.” (Thomas Merton, Trappist monk)

A pastor commented how, for the forty some years of his ministry, he has never given a satisfactory homily explaining the Holy Trinity on this feast day. Even theologians struggle to dissect this aspect of the Godhead. Bishop Christopher Mwoleka of Tanzania commented: “The mystery of the Trinity is not a doctrine dealing with division of power in the Godhead, but a statement about the way in which God shares ‘self ’ with creation and calls us who believe not so much to explain as to imitate that sharing, by sharing our own lives.”

Our ‘forgotten’ feast day, Pentecost Sunday, the beginning of our Christian Church always falls in the midst of graduations, the end of the school year, between Mothers Day and Fathers Day, as individuals and families are transitioning to outdoor activities. Our attention may observe the symbol of the Holy Spirit—red—fashioned in the sanctuary, but we may be distracted away from the significance of this feast in relation to our Church, the faith we inherited, and the Holy Spirit continually at work within the activities, prayers, Sacraments that call us into community.