From Father Steven - October 4th

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
This weekend we will hear in the second reading St. Paul exhorting us to “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. (Phil 4:6). I know that it can be hard not to be anxious, but we trust in the Lord, because GOD IS GOOD, ALL THE TIME!!!
Last weekend in my homilies I was wondering what was the will of God for each one of us. Whether it’s a call to serve someone in some capacity, or to do something, we always need to ask the Lord in our prayers what is His will for us. Certainly we have our own plans and ideas, but not always our plans lead us to salvation. God’s plan, ALWAYS leads us to salvation. As unorthodox or crazy as it seems, God continuously brings us to a path that leads to joy, peace, and the fullness of happiness. As you may know last week, the city of Marlboro was declared to be high-risk or in the “red zone”. As cases have recently increased, we as a parish need to – as Cardinal Sean said- “take care of each other” – by taking the necessary precautions. Besides taking the temperature and names of everyone coming into the church, we are instructed to avoid gatherings as well. One of the major af- fects has been the suspension in person CCD classes. Due to this we changed our model of CCD to a homeschool version.
Another impact of being in the red zone, would be the series of talks that we were going to start this week. After speaking with the priests, parishioners and the team we decided to postpone the catech- esis by the Neocatechumenal way to a later date out of caution. In the meantime, we will continue to discern God’s will as to what we should do in the parish. Our next event will be the 24 hours of Ado- ration that will take place from Sunday Oct 11th after the 5pm Mass through Monday at 6:00pm.
As St. Paul exhorts us, let us not be anxious!!! The fact that we are in the “red zone” does not mean that there is an outbreak of cases in Marlboro. Last week I came across a very interesting article from MassLive titled “Is your Massachusetts hometown in the ‘red’ and considered high risk for COVID spread? Here’s what you need to know”. They quoted Douglas T. Golenbock, Chief of the Di- vision of Infectious Diseases and Immunology at UMass Medical School, who says that " cities or towns at or around the floor of the high risk threshold don’t necessarily need to shut everything down again — only to ensure they’re following the health guidelines with more caution, and keeping watch over the rate of disease in their area.” He added that the methods used by the State in classifying the cities could be “somewhat arbitrary, but that measuring the rate of illness using a comparable popula- tion size helps health experts keep track of the presence of the virus in communities.”
Let us continue praying for the Lord, putting all our trust in him, and see which direction He is leading us.
God bless, Fr Steven