From Our Pastor
Dear Folks,
Do your lives slow down a little bit in the summer? I picked up a bad cough on the Poland trip, so that is making me slow down a little bit this week. Sorry to those I had to reschedule appointments.
My one simple thought this week: “How do you learn to pray the Mass?” My answer to that has always been, “go when you don’t have to.”
See, I learned to pray the Mass when I went to Saturday morning Masses with my parents. They went faithfully every Saturday morning, and had breakfast afterwards with friends. I learned that if I got up and went to Mass with them, that I too would be able to go to Bob’s Big Boy. (Yes, that was the name of a restaurant chain in the 70’s.)
Yes, I may have been going to for the opportunity to order a root beer with my breakfast eggs! But I learned so much more about Mass, and how the rhythm of daily Mass differs from Sundays.
Let me make this analogy: Do you only eat on Sundays when the whole extended family gathers at grandmas for a feast? Sunday Mass is that thanksgiving feast of the whole family! But daily Masses are the regular daily bread for feeding our souls, just as the 6.5 days of nutrition are an essential part of nutrition.
Feed your souls. And doing so freely, without the compulsion of punishment for failure is the way to root our spiritual lives in the freedom of the children of God.
Oh yeah…. I also listened to a podast about forming habits, that said to keep the goals small and easily achievable. The emotional feedback of achieving the goal is what sets it into our routine and makes it a habit! I’ll leave the science of this to the podcast, if you want to listen: https://tinyurl.com/5au3ea3z
This is why I say, “Go to one Mass during the week that you don’t have to (Sundays/HolyDays), and you will change your spiritual life.”
pax,
Father John Mosimann
