From the pastor’s desk on the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time year B
In this Sunday’s gospel our Lord Jesus uses two parables to portray how the kingdom of God grows within us. These are the parables of the seed of grain and of mustard seed. The seed is our faith in Jesus. In the beginning it may look small, even insignificant. But when it falls on the fertile ground of our heart, it may quickly grow and develop until it permeates all of aspects of our life. We may not even notice it that it is there for many years, like that seed in Jesus’ parable in may be growing in silence. Eventually we may recognize that the faith in Jesus has grown within us when we start making decisions based on faith and not only on external circumstances or emotional impulses.
There are so many examples of saints and ordinary people, who can provide for us the testimony to the reality of faith. One of them is Blessed Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), one of my favorite saints. He was born to a noble French family. Charles was not a very faithful Catholic, he even declared himself agnostic, and from his early years became a party boy and a womanizer. He had a career in the French military and took part in the war in Algeria. However, he was not happy with his life—life without God seemed to be empty and meaningless. That is how he began his personal search for God. At that time his faith started to grow while he undertook risky explorations of Morocco. Paradoxically, it was the faith of the Muslims, whom he fought that inspired Charles to think about his own faith. The seed of faith had grown in him so much that he could not help thinking of Jesus. So eventually he decided to become religious. In his memoirs he wrote: “As soon as I believed that there was a God, I understood that there was nothing else I could do but to live totally for him. My religious vocation dates from the same hour as my faith.”
Our life too may sometimes look meaningless and empty. Perhaps, it is a call from God to a genuine conversion, that is, to a change of direction of our life until we focus on Jesus only. If we have that grain of faith, we need to allow it to grow so that it may become a large “tree” within us, a tree of faith that brings spiritual fruits. I pray for you and your families that you may discover the beauty and richness of our faith and that you allow yourself to be guided by it to authentic blessedness of life in God.
Besides this spiritual message, I would like to share with you a quick explanation on the meaning of holy relics that are placed on the new altar in our church. The tradition of the relics placed within the altar “table” is dated to the first centuries of Christianity, when the early communities of the faithful were persecuted for their faith and they had to do clandestine gatherings, frequently in the catacombs. It was in the catacombs that often a Holy Mass would be celebrated over the graves of the martyr saints, that is, over their bodily remains that subsequently became holy relics. Once the Christian faith became widely accepted and officially sanctioned, most of the new churches carried on the tradition of having a saint’s relic under the stone piece on the altar. In our case, we have the relics of fours great saints: Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Jerome, and Saint Ambrose. May their intercession help us to become a community of faithful believers.
Have a blessed week. Fr. Janusz Mocarski, pastor