Happy New Year!

Advent, the beginning our liturgical year, always gets me thinking about the celebration of the new calendar year and all of the traditions with which it is associated. The most notable of these is probably the New Year's resolution. For our own part at St Joseph's, we have been working hard this fiscal year to continue to reform the way we go about parish life, always working to become more engaging, loving, and authentically the Mystical Body of Christ. To that end, this liturgical year, we started to coordinate our message throughout homilies and faith formation in order to more consistently deliver fruitful messages to the souls entrusted to our care.

A few weeks ago the Advent season's homilists--and other pastoral staff like our seminarian Jorge and myself--at St Joseph's focused in together on a theme for this first season of the year: "Stay Awake!" We all have put in a great deal of reflection on what is truly meant by the phrase which appears in both Testaments and multiple circumstances. For me, I have increasingly taken it to mean that I need to be more conscious of the Lord, his life, his light, and his love in all that I do. It is all too easy to allow self-satisfaction creep up on the attitude of gratitude. Self-satisfaction is an attitude that doesn't look for where the person can grow. Nor does it acknowledge the need for accountability. It undermines conversion and decays mission. And this brings me back to New Year's resolutions...

New Year's Resolutions have never worked for me. I've resolved several times to start new healthier routines improving diet, exercise, and quality time with loved ones. Sometimes I succeed for days, even months, but the gradual slide back to overworking and other old, bad habits is hard to stop. The yearly regression to the mean is almost as much of a tradition as the making of the resolutions itself! But this year, I do believe will be quite different.

The problem with New Year's resolutions is that they are made in isolation. They are a test of individual will and mettle against the tides of habit, complacency, comfort, and a rather indulgent society. Those who enter into pacts with others to keep their respective resolutions surely stand a much higher chance of succeeding because they have accountability to their partners. The certainty that someone will notice the lack of commitment and follow-through supports the will through fear of embarrassment or letting the partnership down. The weak point of this arrangement, though, is that the object that can drive the person to keep the resolution could just as easily drive him/her to simply cover up and lie about breaking it. The impetus is toward others believing that the resolution is kept, not in the making of the resolution a true reality.

Which brings me to why this year will be different... Fear is an imperfect motivator. It surely can drive a person, even powerfully, but it drives the person to avoid something rather than to encounter something. So, this year, my motivator will be Love. Love impels the person forward with a definite object, the other person. This year, I won't even try to make my resolution an act of will; it will be an act of love. Being Catholic, we start our new year a little earlier: Advent starts on the Sunday closest to November 30th. So we find ourselves in prime position to make a gift of love out of our resolutions.

For my part, I shall be offering new habits of prayer, mindfulness, and evangelism as a year-long gift to Christ in honor of his birth lifted up out of love. There can be no hiding my lack of follow-through from the eternally present God, but there also won't be the desire to fail when He has never failed me. I will want to make this good change in myself because I love the God made Man who gave me all the good already present in my life. And there can be no greater sustaining support than the ocean of Grace, the very life of God, in which we live and move and have our being.

Women of Strength

On December 3rd of each year, I'm reminded of my grandmother whose birthday it was. She was born in 1919 and would have turned 94 today. As it was, she still marveled at having lived to date a check with the year 2000. The daughter of immigrants from French Canada and the Isle of Mann, it was from this woman that the Catholic faith entered my family, and she was the only person in my life as an adolescent who highly valued attending the Mass. Grandma Dorothy ("Dot") always wanted a priest in the family, but she lived long enough to see me accepted as a seminarian, and I think she'd be happy with how things turned out. 

As an Army nurse, Lt Dorothy Cole tended wounds (and VD) on a hospital ship in the Pacific theatre of World War II. Though her ship (the USS Hope) was later sunk by the Japanese Navy (despite being painted white with a red cross), Dot had already been discharged honorably from her service. She inspired my grandfather to convert from the Church of Latter-Day Saints as a wedding present to her, and they raised six children in the Faith together (four boys and two girls). 

Dot lived for 81 and a half years, the last fifteen in a wheelchair, dying just two weeks after my high school graduation (2001). It wasn't until long after her death that I realized how much I owe to this strong woman. She was a gift from God in my life, and I ask you all to offer thanksgiving with me for great women of strength as we continue to enter into this Advent season. It was after all through a woman of outstanding strength and faith that God entered personally into the world of man.

Thank you all for reading.

New Beginnings and Old Joys

When I moved to the Rochester, NY area this past May, it was the start of a beautiful, exciting Summer for me and my lovely fiancee, then six months engaged. Now in mid-Autumn, with the first snow of the year clinging on for nightfall which will guarantee its survival til morning, I'm drawn to reflect on what a joyful time these six months since have been.

Only two months removed from finally finishing a Master of Arts degree I began seven years ago, I found what I could easily describe as my dream job. On the seventh of July in the year of Our Lord two thousand thirteen, I began my tenure as the director of two outstanding ministries at one of the most engaging and dynamic parishes in the entirety of this Western New York diocese.

Faith for Life is the name the parish has chosen for its the catechetical life of the parish, the ministries and support which communicate the Faith, ever ancient and ever new, from generation to generation. In all aspects of faith formation at this parish, St Joseph's Church in Penfield, families are involved as a part of the ministry. This may not sound extraordinary, but more so than I have seen at most Catholic communities, parents are challenged here to actively communicate and share their faith with their children. Over the course of several years, the parish has continued to move toward an intergenerational, communal exchange of faith experiences alongside faith lessons.

Youth Ministry is the branch of Faith for Life charged with communicating Christ to and with adolescents and their families. My time with these teens and their parents has been an entirely new situation but it's also been very nostalgic. St Joseph's is very similar to the parish in which I found my faith as a teen, and the youth community here has the same caring hearts in its leaders that I remember in my high school home.

I'm looking forward to sharing stories of my life in Rochester and our labors at St Joseph with you all in this space as well as reflections on Scripture, Theology, and Ministry. You may also find some notes here about the journey of my fiancee and I toward marriage. It's not easy to make any marriage work, but starting to make a family with an agnostic and a youth minister is a fun kind of adventure. Here's to our next six months in what I consider to be New York's second city and my new home town!