Starting this Sunday, September 13th, before Mass at Resurrection Parish and next Sunday, September 20th, after Mass at St. Mary Parish, the process of religious formation of children and youth resumes. I chose the words, “process” and “resumes” to indicate that formation in our Faith is a reality that is on-going.
To illustrate this, let’s consider the following. Family living is an on-going experience. We can’t take a one or two year program about family life and then claim that we have learned all that we need to know about living with the members of our family. Family life is a process that is on-going because it consists of a network of relationships. Relationships are a work in progress. We can’t ever say that we have mastered the matter of living with the members of our families because in our development, each person in our families is not where we were a year or two ago.
On the one hand, there are principles of family living that never change. For example, by the Lord’s design, our mother and our father are meant to live in a life-long faithful relationship with each other, a relationship that is open to the possibility of co-creating with God the gift of new life. As children, our parents are intended by the Lord to represent Him in unique ways as we grow up. For as long as we live, we are called to love and to care about our parents in distinctive ways. Brothers and sisters have relationships with one another that are special.
While the principles of family life as the Lord has designed these are unchanging, their application in our daily lives changes. What it means to be a dedicated spouse, parent, child, brother/sister changes as we each continue to develop.
Our Faith in the Lord can be likened to the process of development in our families. From the time that we are born until the time that we die, there are truths to which our Faith testifies that are unchanging, such as that the Lord has created and continues to sustain us, that we are sinners in need of redemption, that in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, we are offered the forgiveness of all of our sins and are given the ability and the mission to extend the Lord’s redeeming Presence as members of the Church as individuals and with others to persons in all of the settings in which we interact with others.
How we make these truths of the Christian Faith real and exciting for ourselves is ever-changing. For this reason, we can never outgrow the need for Faith formation. As adults, are we open to acknowledge that deep within ourselves there is an emptiness that only our Lord can fill? As we allow the Lord to satisfy our deepest hunger, we will be eager to learn more about how we might relate our Faith in the Lord to all that we experience. We will be eager to pursue opportunities for faith formation both individually and with others. Sharing our Faith in the Lord with those entrusted to us, for example, with your children, will become natural and as vital to us as are the tasks of providing food, shelter and clothing for those for whom we are responsible.
I hope and pray that wherever we are in our spiritual development, we will allow ourselves to be embraced by our Lord’s redeeming love. As we do our part to make this happen, we will grow in the awareness that the Good News that we celebrate at Mass has implications for how we relate to all that we experience both individually as well as with others. We will thus have the motivation to pursue Faith formation for as long as we live.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Fr. Nelson Beaver – Pastor