Dear Parishioners,

Happy Easter and welcome to all friends, family, visitors as well as long time parishioners!  Easter is a time and season that brings together in our roomy Church people of many diverse levels of faith and belief to celebrate Jesus and draw closer to one another and to our God.
               
The author James Joyce once described the Catholic Church as “here comes everybody”!  Recently when Fr. Daniel Berrigan had a book dedicated to himself as a “Christian”, he corrected the author to say he had left out one phrase: “would be”, we are all “would be Christians”.  Easter brings together both “seekers” and “finders” (or at least those who think they have found it all); it gathers once-a-year-Catholics and daily  mass communicants; it welcomes the rigorist and the unsure, the liberal and conservative, convinced Catholic, curious non believers and everyone in between.
               
There’s an important, life-giving lesson here.  We cannot build a society or a church with just liberals or just conservatives; to build true community we need to work with more than just those who are like minded.  A community, church or parish built with just the like-minded is hardly worth belonging to because it reflects neither what’s best inside the human spirit nor for those of us who are Christians, the inclusive embrace of Christ.
               
There are those who believe life and the difficult problems of our nations, our planet and its people are all a matter of fate, or maybe Karma or even reincarnation.  Easter says and celebrates the exact opposite.  Now the exact opposite of fate is not chance, or random happenings, or to grimly say just about anything can happen.  The opposite of fate is really hope; to say, as we do in Jesus’ death and resurrection, or in God’s amazing love, that everything is possible.  One author has said that hope is “the  adrenalin of the soul”; it gives us the energy, the vision and the strength to go forward and to work at and do noble things with our life and our world.
               
We live personal lives and in a world deeply in need of hope and noble actions.   May we be a community that hopes together and works together for greater peace, for honest politics, for just and caring societies, for an end to violence and terror, for a welcome to homeless and immigrant, for the safety and quick return of our young people at war.  In other words may we be an Easter people who live out a rugged, realistic and practical Easter hope.

Your Pastor,
Brian T. Joyce