Newsletter - 23 June
Saint Therese
“It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love”. These words of Saint Therese say it all.
They sum up her spirituality. It is confidence that sustains us daily and will enable us to stand before the Lord on the day when he calls us to himself. The confidence that Therese proposes is more than our individual sanctification and salvation. It embraces the totality of concrete existence and finds application in our daily lives, where we are often assailed by fears, the desire for human security, the need to have everything under control. She invites to a holy “abandonment”. Complete confidence becomes abandonment in Love and sets us free from obsessive calculations, constant worry about the future and fears that take away our peace. In her final days, Therese insisted on this: “We who run in the way of love shouldn’t be thinking of suffering that can take place in the future; it’s a lack of confidence”. If we are in the hands of a Father who loves us without limits, we will be able to move beyond whatever may happen to us and, in one way or another, his plan of love and fullness will come to fulfilment in our lives.
Therese experienced faith most powerfully and surely in the midst of dark night, culminating in the final months of her life, in the great “trial against the faith”. She directly relates this period to the painful reality of atheism of her time. She wrote that Jesus allowed her soul “to be invaded by the thickest darkness”, of atheism and rejection of Christian faith. In union with Jesus, who took upon himself all the darkness of the sin of the world when he drank from the cup of the Passion, Therese came to appreciate its underlying sense of despair and sheer emptiness.
Yet darkness cannot overcome the light: Therese felt as a sister to atheists, seated with them at table, like Jesus. She interceded for them, in constant communion with the Lord: “I run toward my Jesus. I tell him I am ready to shed my blood to profess faith in heaven. I tell him, too, that I am happy not to enjoy this beautiful heaven on this earth so that he will open it for all eternity to unbelievers”.
Pope Francis
Focus of the Week
Farewell Party for Fr Christophe
Saturday 29 June, 6:30pm
To commemorate the ten years Fr Christophe has spent in the parish and to wish him well for the future we will be having an evening of cheese and wine.
As part of the celebration there will be a presentation in the church at 8:00pm otherwise please pop in when you can. Please feel free to bring along wine, beer and soft drinks to share amongst us.
If you would like to contribute to a collection, you can do so using the QR Code, online by clicking here or cash via the Parish Office.
(Please, no gifts).
Any money collected will go towards Fr. Christophe’s holiday and an electric bike for his ministry in Grenoble.