Adult Faith Formation class meets weekly during most of the academic year: September to June. The classes meet Monday evening at 7:00 and are repeated Wednesday morning at 9:30. Class usually runs an hour and fifteen minutes. The classes will cover a variety of topics with special emphasis on scripture.
For more information contact Kevin Kennedy at 760-489-0482 email: kevin@sttimothychurch.com
Dear Fellow Parishioners of St. Tim,
I was preparing this as a soup supper talk, but with them cancelled, I thought I would share it anyway as the theme may be appropriate for this time of coronavirus. Very dear to my heart is a concept that I will call “the appropriation of the Paschal Mystery.” There is great power in knowing that the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, i.e., the Paschal Mystery, is my assurance that anything that seems like death here on earth can, in the end, be a source of new life. Faith says that after all the “mini deaths” we undergo: job losses, relationships ended, failures of any kind, there is resurrection to new life on the other side. However, just as Jesus spent three days in the tomb, our appropriation of the Paschal Mystery will entail some time spent in a tomb, the tomb of uncertainty, the tomb of anxiety, the tomb of doubt. And so I collected some prayers that seem appropriate, to me at least, to be prayed during time spent in the tomb. The first one is a prayer from a bible study that we recently did and everyone seemed to like it and so perhaps it deserves to be better known.
Prayers while in the Tomb.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
-Thomas Merton
God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.
-Cardinal John Henry Newman
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Let’s pray for one another. In Christ, Kevin Kennedy
Join us for a new Adult Faith Formation class begins
2/24/2020
First class Monday. Feb 24 at 7:00 PM in Room St. Dominic, repeated Wednesday morning at 9:30 AM.
No registration required and no cost. Info: kevin@sttimothychurch.com
This course surveys biblical wisdom literature by a study of important scriptural texts, including Proverbs, Job, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Song of Songs (Canticle of Cancticles), Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, and selections from the Gospels as well as from the book of Psalms.
The lectures take up the array of topics and problems that are recurrent in the Bible’s sapiential books, with special emphasis on the problem of the suffering of the innocent but also including such themes as friendship, virtue and vice, marriage and the choice of a spouse, decision making, life priorities, child rearing, illness, and death.
Reverend Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Xavier University (in Cincinnati, Ohio) with an Honors A.B. in Classical Languages and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from St. Louis University. Since his priestly ordination in 1992, Father Koterski has been a member of the Philosophy department at Fordham University and was chair of that department from 2002 to 2005.