From Father Steven

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
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Imagine that our favorite band is coming to town, a great movie is coming out in the theaters, or the opening day of a promising season of your favorite team is tomorrow. How excited would we get? Wouldn’t we share that with our friends and post lots of comments and pictures on social media? Or imagine now that we were given great tickets to attend an event, and we get 10 extra tickets to bring friends. We would try to bring our friends along? Maybe one of them might need some encouragement and convincing to understand how great the event will be. When we speak about Christ, our faith or a Church event, somehow, we do not have that same excitement. Truth to be told, having a personal experience of Jesus Christ beats any famous person that we can meet backstage. What better story is there than the story of our salvation? Imagine how we can get excited about Ash Wednesday as the first day of a promising (Lenten) season!!! Having experienced the love of God, we should be telling all our friends that we have free tickets (front row if you want) to attend the best of all events, Christ giving himself to us at Mass! If someone has not gone to Church in a while, let’s invite that person for confession. What better feeling is there than having all of your sins forgiven? Jesus Christ tells us in this week’s Gospel that WE ARE THE SALT OF THE EARTH! Salt is one of the most important minerals in the world. For Centuries, it has been used all over the world as a way to preserve food, heal wounds, and even for purification. Salt is essential for human life. On a daily basis, salt can bring excitement to a boring, tedious, tasteless meal. Now imagine that Jesus Christ calls us to do the same in the world, that is, to bring healing and preserving the world from going bad. We are also called to give meaning to the lives of the people whose lives have lost their meaning. How can we do that? How can we become disciples and disciples makers?

Thinking on the mission that Christ calls us to spread his word, we are about to start some initiatives to help us evangelize. One of these initiatives is called DISCIPLES IN MISSION. This is the start our parish becoming a center of evangelization. There will be an informational session this Wednesday, February 12th at 6pm in the Lower Church Hall. Representatives from the Archdiocese will explain what the process is, and we will answer any question you may have. Then we will have 2 all day workshops “Forming Disciples” and “Forming Leaders” on March 7th and 28th, respectively. During Lent, we will have confessions every Wednesday from 6-7 PM to help us get ready for Easter. I will write more about confession next week to help alleviate some difficulties that we have approaching this sacrament. We will also have a series of talks throughout Lent on Mondays and Thursdays starting March 9th . Soon we will also roll out a new and better way of communicating with the parishioners. Through a new program called Flocknote, we will be able to send email messages to parishioners, important reminders, and much more. Stay tuned! For the teenagers (grade 7-12) there will be a great speaker, Jason Evert, coming to Boston on the days of March 15th and 16th. We will have a bus leaving from the parish to send our youth to listen to him. Next week we will have more details.

I think it’s important to share a fruit of the evangelization that we are already doing here at IC. One of our second graders, Connor Long, after learning about baptism in our school, has asked to be baptized. This gives us a little glimpse of the awesome work that teachers and staff are doing in our school. We would like to invite everyone to participate at Connor’s baptism next Sunday, February 16th, at the 9am Mass. It is a very important event for our parish/school community. Our parish is doing a amazing work, but much more needs to be done! Let’s pray to get excited about our faith! As St. Ignatius would say, let’s set the world aflame with the fire of the Holy Spirit.

God bless,
Fr Steven