Moving On
With plans in place for our children to return to school, for the need to improve the economy and indeed the needs of daily life, there is an important need to develop a sense of returning to life. There is still a long way to go, so care and caution are the order of the day, but The power of the positive is truly important.
We need to get back to a normal way of life.
Our return to Mass is, please God, beginning to settle down and hopefully falling into a pattern. Like most parishes we have an important requirement for persons under seventy years of age to meet the criteria for stewarding and cleaning. We are therefore asking younger people to offer their services to help our parish.
As Students are returning to their studies and others returning to work, this is now a very urgent need. Our desire and our blessing to celebrate Mass has its own importance, and with so many elderly people (which includes me) who are careful, responsible persons, there is a call for greater support from the younger generation. Then we can be more at ease knowing that we can continue to gather to celebrate Mass.
We must turn to the future with hope, but reality is now making its presence felt. The fact is that the church is in a very weak state of being. The wonderful opportunity that was presented to the church was not availed of and the closure of so many seminaries – ignored by those in authority – has left us with a very critical situation to respond to. I hear it said, and by priests, that after the coronavirus there will not be a major return to church, and that we will have to develop a different approach to life in our churches. Mass will always be at the heart of it, but how and in what way it will be celebrated will make a truly important difference to the future of our lives.
So consistently two things. The first is a relationship with Jesus through the church and our faith. At the heart of this is in preparation for Baptism and First Holy Communion, “I belong”, this is the most important book and is the foundation. The strength of this foundation is everything. And the second is Nourishment. How we nourish our physical bodies determines our health and our wellbeing. This is equally vital to our spiritual lives, so it deserves all the care and attention we can bring to it.