Saint Mary, Saint Michael & Saint Kilian Parishes
Saint Mary, Saint Michael & Saint Kilian Parishes
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  • Home
  • About
    • Homilies
    • Pastor's Column
    • Parish Histories
    • Cemetery Rules & Regulations
  • Bulletin
  • Mass Schedule
  • Religious Education
  • Resources
  • Sacraments
    • Baptism
    • Sacrament of Penance
    • First Communion
    • Confirmation
    • Holy Matrimony
    • Becoming Catholic
  • Online Giving
  • Contact Us

Thanksgiving & Knowing the Value of What We Have

11/24/2017

 
Dear friends,
 
Hope you are doing well. I believe you are rested up after the Thanksgiving celebration. I also believe that the Thanksgiving was a great one for all of you.
 
Now from the next week we will be starting another new liturgical year. We start it with the period of expectation, which is Advent. Let us all join in prayers and reconciliation to wait for the coming of the Lord Jesus. I would like to invite you all to make your confessions to have a meaningful and fruitful celebration of the Christmas.
 
Once there was a man who owned a horse. Due to some reasons, he wanted to sell his horse. So, he went to a merchant and asked for help as to how to sell it. The man asked him to take the horse to the market and sell it. But the owner asked the merchant to help him with a small speech which he can deliver about the horse and the people would listen to him and buy the horse. The merchant wrote for him a ‘sale speech’. That went like this: Hey folks I am here to sell my horse. This is an Arabian horse and it is strong and gentle. It can carry any heavy load and it is good too for children to have rides on. This horse will obey your orders immediately and would understand you well. If you own this horse, he will be a good companion for you.
 
When the owner heard the speech written by the merchant about his horse, his eyes shone brightly and said to himself, ‘Oh! My horse is so good! Why then should I sell it? I won’t sell it’. Saying thus to himself he took his horse and went home happily that he owned such a good and valiant horse.
 
Most of the times this happens in our lives too. We do not understand or realize the value of something when we own it. The value of a friend, we do not realize until we lose him/her. The blessing of the parents/grandparents is not understood until they are lost. This is also the same in our Christian life. We do not understand the value of being a Christian. We do not value our Christian faith, we do not value our Catholic identity, we do not value the celebration of the Holy Mass, we do not value the celebration of the Sacraments, we do not value the reading of the Scriptures, we do not value the praying of the Rosary, we do not value the practices of devotion, we do not value the gift of the reconciliation, we do not even sometimes value the fact that we have Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
 
This is not to find fault with, but to make a good retrospection. This is a self-inspection and examination of our Christian life. Let us realize the gift of being a Catholic and may we express it by living more Christian and Catholic.
God bless you all.
Sincerely yours in Christ Jesus,
Fr. A. Antony
 

Mass as an encounter with the passion of the Risen Lord

11/17/2017

 
Dear friends,
Hope you are doing well in spite of the fact that we broke a record with 6-7-degree Fahrenheit this past Friday. Let everything go well with all of you by the grace of God and His guidance.
To make up for the cold we have experienced, our Holy Father has made some heated statements last Wednesday. He said, “It upsets me when I celebrate Mass in the square or in the basilica and I see so many mobile phones in the air, not only from the faithful, but also from some priests and bishops... Please... Mass is not a show, it is going to the encounter of the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord.” The Holy Father was much concerned about the way we understand Holy Mass and the way we treat it. Most of the times, the attendance in the Mass seems to be a way to assert our membership in the parish community. We come for the sake of coming and we attend for the name’s sake. That is why our Holy Father insists with the word please. He states that it is not a show of any sort but an encounter with the passion of the Risen Lord. He proceeds to say, “When we (the priests, Bishops and Pope himself) say we lift up our hearts, we don’t say “we lift up our phones to take photos!” Nowadays the cellphone has become an extended part of our bodies. This invention is so good as long as we have the control over it, not the other way around.
If we really understand not only the angst of the Pope through these words and understand the true meaning of the Holy Mass, our entire response would be so good towards the Mass. In reality we do not understand or we underestimate the significance of the Holy Mass. That is why our approach to the celebration of the Holy Eucharist is so indifferent. This indifference ranges in its expression from our attire, our movements like walking, genuflecting, paying reverence to the Eucharist and the altar, non-observance of silence in the church, lack of attention to the activities during the Eucharist or Homily (a time to read the bulletin…?), the way we receive communion, chewing gum, and many more like these. It is because we do not understand this, we are unable to teach our children about this.
Our Holy Father succinctly puts this like this: “Have you seen how the children make the sign of the cross? You don't know what they're doing, if it's the sign of the cross or a drawing. They do it like this and don't know how... (Here Holy Father demonstrates how the children make the sign of the cross in the video) We need to learn and teach the children to do it correctly. That's how the Mass begins, life begins, the day begins. It means we have been saved by the Cross of the Lord. Look at the children and teach them to make the sign of the cross correctly.” That our children are entitled to receive the First Holy Communion at the age of seven, we are left with added responsibility of teaching our kids about all what they need to know at that stage.
What we need to do is to create a new culture in the modern culture. We need to spare time for our children during which we need to teach them better things than the material things, the infinite things rather than the finite things, eternal things rather than the temporal things. We need to teach them all these because they are entrusted to our care. If we do not do that, we are accountable to God for them. Teach them that we can live without most things which we have come to think are indispensable. That is what they need to learn rather than meddling with cell phones and be stuck with it. They are to be used, not to be venerated more than our own being.
God bless.  Fr. A. Antony
 

Finding Happiness in Abundance and in Poverty

11/10/2017

 


Dear friends,
At last, what we were fearing about is here. Yes, the snow. The ‘white stuff’ is here and we need to face it whether we want or not. It may have some adverse effects on some farmers. We continue to pray for them and hope things would be better for them.
I was once standing in a line to buy ticket in front of a movie theatre. People were there along with me. There was one particular man standing in the line with a small kid on his shoulder. The child boy was looking at the people around him. Of course, a candy vendor caught hold of his sight. The boy asked his dad to buy candies for him. The man did not care much about what the little boy was saying. Again, the boy asked him little loudly for candies. The dad kept silent. The boy seemed to become more and more demanding and started pestering the man. At one point the boy started yelling and screaming asking for the candy. The dad kept his cool. I was watching the scene for a while and I got a kind of upset with the man for not buying him a candy.
After I came out of the theatre the scene again came to my mind. I started looking at the same scene from the point of view of the man. I consider that the man followed a good technique of parenting. I would think that one of the techniques of parenting would be to say no to the child. The children should learn to accept a no from anyone, including from the parents. The world is not going to be offering whatever one wants. There will be times when we may not get what we want or what we need. This learning to accept a no would make the mind mature. If the children do not learn this lesson, when they grow up to be adults and come to a state where they may have to face a no from someone for the first time, the effect would be adverse. The reaction of the person also might become destructive and disruptive. This scenario is not good either for that individual or for the society where the person lives in.
Another aspect of this technique of parenting is that, the children who get anything when they think they want it tend to grow without realizing the value or worth of what they get and what others may not get. For instance, the child who gets money whenever the child thinks he/she wants it, will grow up to be one who may not know the value of money. When one does not know the value of something, one would not be able to appreciate that. This is not going to be good in any way. A child who grows up learning to accept a no from anyone will grow up an adult who would be mature and with a great sense of appreciation.
When I say this, I don’t mean to say no to any child just for no reason. I would like the children to grow in a real world. Real world is not filled with everything to everyone. We must learn to live in abundance and in poverty. If we learn it, we will be happy even when we do not get what we need or want. That is the way to keep ourselves content and happy all the time. If we do not learn this, we will be disappointed and unhappy more than anyone who has learnt this technique.
Learn to live without something and that will teach us how to live with that something.
God bless.
Yours sincerely in Christ Jesus,
Fr. A. Antony

Missed Opportunities and a Bull

11/3/2017

 


Dear friends,
I hope you are well. We have started having snow, a long-awaited thing. We are getting ourselves ready to face what is going to come, the winter, the snow, the ice….. Hope this is going to be at mild one.
Once there was a young man who was in love with the daughter of a farmer. He wanted to marry her. The girl's father told that young man that he would let him marry his daughter if he was able to tame one of his bulls. The young man accepted the deal. The day for the challenge came near. The young man got himself ready to face the challenge in order to marry that girl because he loved her so much.
According to the agreement of the challenge the young man will have three bulls to choose from to tame. He had to tame at least one of those three bulls. So, the challenge began. The first bull was let out for him to be tamed. The young man looking at the bull thought that he could tame one of the other two bulls. So, he just let the first bull go. Now he had only two more chances.
Now the second bull was let out for the young man to tame. The bull seemed very fero-cious and violent. The young man was scared. Because of the fear he did not claim the second bull also. So, now he had only one chance and that was the last one for him. When the third bull was let out, to the surprise of that young man, the bull had neither horns nor a tail. So, he could not take the third bull also. The young man was dismayed. The young man lost the challenge and the girl too.
Our life is full of chances or opportunities. Opportunities to love people, opportunities to help people, opportunities to relate with people, opportunities to smile at people, oppor-tunities to live your life to the fullest, opportunities to relate with God, opportunities to reconcile with him, opportunities to listen to him, opportunities to talk to him, opportuni-ties to have conversation with him, opportunities to pray to him. But, do we make use of these opportunities? Most times we miss them.
The fact that we miss the opportunities may be due to our laziness, maybe due to our unwillingness, maybe due to our various complexes, maybe due to all introvert attitudes, maybe the things that happened in our life, maybe due to various other reasons. But be-cause we miss all these opportunities we are the ones at loss. Nobody is going to suffer that loss. Because we miss those opportunities, we miss to make our life fruitful and hap-py. We need to use these opportunities. Because every time we miss one of them we miss our opportunity to be happy and lively.
Most often we do not take time to see the opportunities that come along our way. We are so immersed in too many things that to take time for seeing the opportunity becomes impossible. If we could see those opportunities in our life, we can make full use of them and we can be happy and also make others happy. Look for opportunities…..Use them well.….Live happily……
Sincerely yours in Christ Jesus,
Fr. A. Antony

    Pastor's Column
    Posted here is the weekly column featured in the bulletin of Saint Mary, Saint Michael & Saint Kilian parishes.

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