Pastor’s Pen – May 3, 2024
NEWS
Congratulations and prayers for MaryAnne who will make her First Communion this Sunday. Her parents (Goretski) and grandparents (Nordmoe) are parishioners here at Ss. Peter and Paul. The Easter season – when we especially contemplate the presence of the Risen Lord among us – is the traditional time in the church for the sacraments of initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and First Eucharist. We have celebrated all three in recent weeks. If we can enter into the words and symbols of those liturgies, they can recall for us, and renew within us, our own sacraments of initiation into the Life of Christ – a time to reawaken and give thanks for the ways the life of the Risen Christ has entered into us and worked its gradual transformation in our lives. And we pray together as a community of faith that our initiates may be filled with the same Holy Spirit.
On Wednesday, May 15, the Jesuit Friends and Alumni will hold their next luncheon with guest speaker Tom Szczepanski on “Finding God in All Things (…sometimes through the eyes of others).” Tom is CEO of Angel’s Place, providing homes and services to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Register HERE. And on Saturday, May 18, the Detroit Jesuit Community will celebrate its SEVEN Jubilarians and the many years of service they have given through our Jesuit ministries here in Detroit. The event is free for all, but please register HERE. Find more info on both these events elsewhere in this eNews.
MOTHER’S DAY… IN GAZA
On May 12 we’ll celebrate Mother’s Day with a special blessing at our Sunday Mass. In previous years I’ve written here about the roots of Mother’s Day in the anti-war and suffragette movements of the late 19th century, such as the 1868 gathering of mothers of former Union and Confederate soldiers to promote reconciliation, or the anti-war efforts of Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist and composer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Her call for a “Mother’s Day for Peace” in 1870, in light of the recently-ended American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, could just as well apply to our world today. I quote it in part…
Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.
Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies…. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession.
As Howe wrote, we are filled with grief and horror at what has happened and is happening in Gaza and the Holy Land. You have daily access to countless commentaries, opinions and analyses across the political spectrum about things happening there, as well as the protests transpiring here on our campuses; you don’t need from me yet another opinion. Rather, as we all navigate our way through this, or any, conflicted human situation and face concrete choices, we refocus our minds and hearts on the core tenets of our faith to guide us. Our allegiance is to the flourishing of the whole human family under God our Creator, not to any nation, party, or cause. We try to discern the will of God, not follow human influencers and authorities. We seek always and everywhere the reconciliation of enemies, in season and out. We are humbled under the seemingly-impossible command of Jesus to love our enemies. We are guided by the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures who cry out and act out for justice for the poor and oppressed. We follow the way of the Cross, not that of force and violence. We pray constantly. We thirst for the Holy Spirit. We await a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem.