A CHALLENGE TO TRANSFORM OUR PARISH TO BECOME A COMMUNION OF COMMUNITIES

Beloved co-journeyer in life and faith!

On behalf of the Pastoral Team (PT) and the Parish Pastoral Council (PPC), I wish to greet all of you a blessed Easter and pray for the gifts it brings to you, your loved ones and to our parish-community.

Our Lenten journey came so fast and we are now celebrating the spirit of Easter even in the most ordinary routines we do daily. Hopefully, as we look back on what we have been through our parish activities to relive the greatest expression of God’s love for us – offering His only begotten Son’s life for our salvation, we can always capture the irreversible imprint of God’s mercy and compassion that transforms our human frailty into a living sign of God’s infinite and unconditional love. A Challenge To Transform our Parish to become a Communion of Communities.

As we embark our Easter journey, I would like to humbly invite each and every member of our parish to take seriously the message of Jesus’ resurrection – Easter is God’s ‘yes’ to all that Jesus preached and taught to His followers and God’s ‘no’ to the powers that killed Him. For Jesus, God was the central reality of His life and the Kingdom of God was the center of His message. The Kingdom of God was not about Heaven, not about life after death, but about the transformation of life on earth, as the Lord’s Prayer affirms. It is not about “Take us to Heaven when we die,” but about “Your Kingdom come on earth” – as already in Heaven. The Kingdom of God on earth was about God’s passion – and Jesus’s passion – for the transformation of “this world”: the humanly created world of injustice and violence into a world of justice, peace and care for mother earth.

In so doing, let us remember that Lent allowed us to personally and communally experience God’s mercy and compassion. Easter empowers us to share, even to the extent of offering forgiveness and reconciliation within our homes, workplaces and communities in order to transform these sacred places from being tombs of death to being tabernacles of life and love. We cannot find Jesus in the tomb among the dead because He lives among the living, in our hearts where mercy and compassion is truly alive.

Let me take this opportunity to express my humble and profound gratitude to all those who participated our Lenten and Easter preparations and activities, especially the PPC officers and members, different ministries and organizations, and to all our parish staff and employees. Your tireless endeavor joyfully lightens our journey by doing God’s will and purpose.

Your co-journeyer,

Fr Reu Jose C. Galoy, OFM

As published in the April 16 issue of the Parish Bulletin.