Where did the time go? It’s May already and each May 1st I get to celebrate the greatest gift of all: another year of life. Where did the time go? This year was #57 on the old ticker of life and it seems just like yesterday that it was #56 or a few days ago that my family and I celebrated #50 at Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park or like a week ago when I celebrated #44 and was ordained a priest. The gift of this greatest blessing is the memories I have accumulated, the life experiences I have shared and perhaps the small amount of wisdom I have gained. It is hard to count them all, because of computer crashes and lost documents, but this is around Friday post #460. Some of them are lost to history but the 407 reflections that live on facebook are a good reminder of where I have been and hopefully point to where I will be going.
In that post from November 2010 I wrote about my first Worldwide Marriage Encounter Weekend (WWME) and shared this quote: “Venerable Concepcion Cabrera Armida a twentieth century Mexican mystic writes this beautiful image, “To open the heart is to surrender what is most intimate and personal. We all can enter into that open and empty space.”” One of the great blessings of looking back over the ### of life (and these are numbers not hashtags) is the blessings that they stir in our souls. In truth some of the reflections are hard to read, they talk about hurt, death, brokenness and sin. Sometimes they remind me that my heart may have been to hard to see the fullness of what I was writing about and at other times to delicate in skirting the hard truths about our Catholic faith. Maybe this is one of the reasons I don’t reread my reflections too often…but it is a good act of humility.
And some things don’t change much. In a couple of weeks I will begin my 8th year of presenting weekends for WWME as I will join couples from many parishes in the Bay Area for a weekend of growth and joy in the sacramental love of the God’s grace and blessing. It was something I looked forward to in November of 2010 and blessing that has grown ever greater as the years have gone by and my relationships with the community has grown deeper and stronger.
And speaking of marriage; I had the wonderful privilege of celebrating the wedding of my niece Sarah and her (now) husband John. It was a joyful reminder to me of how the Sacraments, but most especially Holy Matrimony, are gifts from God in uniting the world into a place of blessing and hope. I spoke to them about how marriage is founded on the virtues of faith, hope and love. Faith: something greater than you is being created and becoming in the world. Hope: that the future is filled with more than is realized than what is alone and apart. And Love: faith and hope will only survive in the sacrificial offering of one to the other in the continual act of sacramental love. As Venerable Concepcion says (and it’s true) “To open the heart is to surrender what is most intimate and personal. We all can enter into that open and empty space.”
God Bless
Fr. Mark