Letter from the Pastor
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November 13, 2022Our Church year is winding down. Next Sunday is the Solemnity of Christ the King; it is the last Sunday of the Year. The following Sunday, November 27th is the First Sunday of Advent, a new year of grace.
We will offer Solemn Vespers and Benediction at 4:00PM next Sunday in honor of Christ the King. We will also pray the TE Deum, the great hymn of past year. Please try to attend, bring the children, our choir will be praying with us as well. More next week.
Have you noticed these past few years, the decorations and costumes for Halloween have turned really macabre and gory; Halloween used to be fun. We dressed up as clowns, pirates, princesses, hobos, and Superman, maybe Casper the Friendly Ghost. We had tons of candy, the apples we threw away but the money we kept.
We knew it was the night before All Saints Day, on which our true heroes in heaven are celebrated. Then the next day we prayed for the holy souls in Purgatory. We had a healthy understanding of those days. Because we were taught that death had no sting, nor any attractiveness. We knew we were protected from demons and ghosts by the angels and saints. So we enjoyed going to haunted houses to be scared, but we knew it wasn’t real. Yet something changed, perhaps it is the rejection of God and Christ. It is the rejection of the resurrection and life everlasting. For the 17% of Americans who don’t believe in an afterlife, death is the great end, so like the Sadducees of old, they are sad people for they too have no hope, nothing to look forward.
Tragically when Christ is rejected, hope is rejected, and the only thing left to do is to arrogantly claim to be gods who determine what is real or “your truth” and all there is, is right here, so “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die.”
As the Church’s year comes to its conclusion, the Church makes us look at the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell, not in a morose way, but in hope. Death without resurrection is the ultimate absurdity, the ultimate evil.
In this month of November, the month of remembrance, we remember our beloved dead, whose bonds of love and affection continue to knit us together as the one family of God.
We are people of hope, hope in life everlasting.
