Dear Parishioners and Supporters of Immaculate Conception Church,
This coming Sunday we will celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, also known as Corpus Christi. It falls this year on Father’s Day. As I have done in the past, I will call my Dad on the phone and thank him for his role in bringing me into this world, for doing his best to provide for me and raise me.
Some of us have had challenging relationships with our fathers, especially in our childhood or adolescence. I include myself in that category. It is good to recognize that with understanding and compassion. There are fellow adult parishioners who have fraught relationships with their aging dads as they move into the sunset of their lives while struggling with physical, mental, or emotional decline. I know it is not easy to navigate those situations and feelings, but they do it with the grace and strength that God provides. Even when it appears small, a father’s wound carried with us can go quite deep.
I also recognize that there are people in our congregations who have been blessed with amazing relationships with their fathers, just as there are parishioners who do not even know their fathers or have been physically or emotionally distant from them for decades. And there are those whose dads have long passed away from this world. Their feelings towards them, too, can be intense, even many years after their death. So, our celebration of Father’s Day can evoke a whole range of emotional reactions.
At Sunday Masses this weekend, we will bless all dads in our congregations. They need our prayers and can use some public recognition of their daily sacrifices, especially when their own children are too small, or too big and busy to do it themselves. We will ask God to bestow on those fathers' patience, perseverance, and peace. As we recognize their role as protectors of their children, we are going to ask the Holy Spirit to empower dads from our parish to be courageous and persistent in building a more just, ecologically sustainable, and non-violent world in which their children can survive and thrive.
In fact, this Sunday, we will pray for all fathers, both the exemplary ones and those who have made a lot of big mistakes in their lives. In the Gospel story this Sunday, Jesus called on his disciples to gather whatever bread and fish they could find from among the people around them. He then lifted up all they found to his heavenly Father in gratitude and fed the hunger of the multitudes. We, too, will gather however few, our personal acknowledgments and silent prayers of gratitude for our fathers, regardless of how successful they have been in their roles. We will then spiritually place them on the altar and lift them up in prayer and trust to God. Thus, caught up in the mystery of Christ – His risen Body bearing the signs of the fathers’ wounds many of us carry – we will allow ourselves to partake of a miracle in which we satisfy the deep hunger for our earthly fathers’ and heavenly Father’s love.
Jacek Orzechowski, OFM
This coming Sunday we will celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, also known as Corpus Christi. It falls this year on Father’s Day. As I have done in the past, I will call my Dad on the phone and thank him for his role in bringing me into this world, for doing his best to provide for me and raise me.
Some of us have had challenging relationships with our fathers, especially in our childhood or adolescence. I include myself in that category. It is good to recognize that with understanding and compassion. There are fellow adult parishioners who have fraught relationships with their aging dads as they move into the sunset of their lives while struggling with physical, mental, or emotional decline. I know it is not easy to navigate those situations and feelings, but they do it with the grace and strength that God provides. Even when it appears small, a father’s wound carried with us can go quite deep.
I also recognize that there are people in our congregations who have been blessed with amazing relationships with their fathers, just as there are parishioners who do not even know their fathers or have been physically or emotionally distant from them for decades. And there are those whose dads have long passed away from this world. Their feelings towards them, too, can be intense, even many years after their death. So, our celebration of Father’s Day can evoke a whole range of emotional reactions.
At Sunday Masses this weekend, we will bless all dads in our congregations. They need our prayers and can use some public recognition of their daily sacrifices, especially when their own children are too small, or too big and busy to do it themselves. We will ask God to bestow on those fathers' patience, perseverance, and peace. As we recognize their role as protectors of their children, we are going to ask the Holy Spirit to empower dads from our parish to be courageous and persistent in building a more just, ecologically sustainable, and non-violent world in which their children can survive and thrive.
In fact, this Sunday, we will pray for all fathers, both the exemplary ones and those who have made a lot of big mistakes in their lives. In the Gospel story this Sunday, Jesus called on his disciples to gather whatever bread and fish they could find from among the people around them. He then lifted up all they found to his heavenly Father in gratitude and fed the hunger of the multitudes. We, too, will gather however few, our personal acknowledgments and silent prayers of gratitude for our fathers, regardless of how successful they have been in their roles. We will then spiritually place them on the altar and lift them up in prayer and trust to God. Thus, caught up in the mystery of Christ – His risen Body bearing the signs of the fathers’ wounds many of us carry – we will allow ourselves to partake of a miracle in which we satisfy the deep hunger for our earthly fathers’ and heavenly Father’s love.
Jacek Orzechowski, OFM