Our Lady of Lourdes Church and School

Last weekend we celebrated a wonderful explosion of faith in our church as we entered fully into the great three-day feast that is the Triduum - Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. The culmination of the celebration saw eleven people join our community, in a sense beginning new lives among us. New life tends to bring with it a certain sense of hope and anticipation, and sometimes even fear and concern. As a new parent might reflect, the light of life shining on the face of a newborn child overwhelms us and fill us with all manner of hopes and dreams for the newborn infant as he or she grows into becoming their own person. Their life is the occasion of some hopes and dreams being realized, while others may need to be relinquished as life unfolds and circumstances require it.

When new life enters into our community of faith, it is a good opportunity to reflect on what it is that we would desire and hope for, not only for those newly come among us, but also for ourselves. In the same way that a newborn transforms the life of a parent, so we are all called to consider how we might be our better selves with and for the new life that is entrusted to us by the grace of our loving God. What kind of community would we build for them? What kind of support and encouragement will we strive to provide for them? Perhaps we might wonder at those aspects of our own frustrated dreams or hopes, and learning from them, endeavor to work at addressing whatever we might be lacking as a community of believers, and which would be for the good of all of us.

I’m not so much thinking about programs or opportunities for service for the moment, as much as I am thinking about our inner dispositions, both individual and collective. I wonder what kind of welcome we offer to people? Once the novelty of sacrament passes and the ordinariness of our community faith life takes hold of us again, how do we nurture and support one another? Will I have the courage to reach out to a new face each week perhaps, and introduce myself? Might I dare to overcome my embarrassment and re-introduce myself to someone I see a couple of pews over every Sunday I’m in church and just wish them a happy Sunday? What can I do to move myself out of my comfort zone, across into that of another, and perhaps open the possibility of both of our lives being enriched? Maybe I will undertake to smile more? Maybe I’ll make a point of moving in in the pew rather than make someone climb over me? Maybe I’ll make an effort to linger after church on Sunday morning and enjoy a cup of coffee and a bagel or donut with some fellow church-goers? Maybe I’ll make sure to have an empty chair beside me and invite someone to join me?

Sometimes we only need to consider what it is that we might wish happened for ourselves, and then we choose to become the fulfillment of that wish for another. We all have some ideas about how we have encountered a certain coldness or distance from others at Church. So what can I do so that I will never offer that coldness or rebuff to another? It’s not enough that we don’t do something. As Christians, we are called to act, to actually “do” something to show that we are willing to welcome and to accompany someone. We do it for no other reason than it is good to do it. We do it because deep in our own hearts we understand that Jesus calls us to be more for the world rather than be less, to be a blessing for the world rather than be yet another example of its mediocrity.