This weekend the Catholic Church celebrates Priesthood Sunday, a day when parishes and communities are asked to pray for their parish priest and all priests around the world. It is a very special day for my brother priests and I as we receive the many blessings surrounding us as members of the Body of Christ. Pope Benedict XVI in his Holy Thursday homily in 2008 spoke these words, “”To serve the Lord”—priestly service precisely also means to learn to know the Lord in his Word and to make it known to all those he entrusts to us.”

The call to service in the Word or God is at the center of priestly ministry. The ordained ministry is founded on a special call to serve God and his people knowing our Lord Jesus deeply and with profound love. And this is the greatest challenge that we all face as disciples of Jesus…we can know a lot about him but do we know him?

This has been the greatest ongoing blessing of my eleven years of ministry: getting to know Jesus better each and every day of my life through sacramental service and love. It has been the daily and hourly conversations that I have had with our Lord: laughing and crying, singing and shouting, blessing and cursing as I seek to hear his voice ever deeper in my heart. And yes, I have failed miserably at times to hear this beloved voice whispering in my heart. Thank God for confession.

These moments of dialogue become moments of blessings because in this conversation of love I have discovered more and more each day I am not alone in my priestly ministry but it is founded and enlivened in and through relationships of love with those God has called me to serve. In my work in the parishes I have served and especially my work in the Worldwide Marriage Encounter movement I have grown in the understanding of how my vocation to serve is enlivened, enriched and made holy in the relationships of joy and love that God call me to enter into in the laughing and crying, the singing and shouting and even the cursing and blessing. It is here that Our Lord is calling forth the priesthood I am.

It is not the case that there is no hurts, frustrations and sadness’s in serving God in the ordained priesthood…those are the moments of crying, shouting and cursing…because it is through these moments, where in a conversation of love with my Lord Jesus, God’s graces flows forth in my greatest conversion, my greatest intimacy and my greatest blessings. In growing in the understanding that through sacramental relationships the blessing of God’s holy Church bring true peace and joy to my heart and to the hearts of the faithful.

Here is part of a prayer our Bishop gave to all priests of the Diocese of San Jose several years ago and a prayer I offer each morning, “Be with us this day. Give us the courage to be strong, loving and wise: strong in prayer, loving in service and wise ministers of your mercy.” This prayer is a constant reminder of the obligation to love, to serve and to be merciful in each interaction, thought and prayer. We become what we pray…or in the Latin, “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. Lex Vivendi”

On this Priesthood Sunday, please pray for your local priest, offer him a word of encouragement and bless him with a smile.

God Bless

Fr. Mark

 

I am bound by the vows I have made, God, I will pay you the debt of thanks for you have saved my life from death. (Ps 56:12)