From Our Pastor
Dear Folks,
A Holy and Blessed Easter to you and all of your loved ones! As we complete the octave of Easter with the Feast of Divine Mercy! This year there will devotions in honor of Divine Mercy after the 10:30am Mass at HCA, and after the 2:30pm Mass in the church! So double the opportunity to pray these devotions!
I was recently mulling over two things: a priest saying, ‘I wish we could see the face of Jesus,’ and our Confirmation candidates’ letters saying, ‘I want to
get closer to God.’ Aren’t these really the same thing? Everyone of us longs to see Him, know Him, and love Him. Yet we do so by faith, hope, and charity. People may think that faith is easy for priests. It isn’t easy for anybody.
Our longing and searching and yearning to be closer to God and see His face it itself a work of grace. It is love stirring us to greater faith and hope. And the answer is that we can’t desire to be closer unless He is already with in us. We can’t long to see His face unless has already given us a glimpse.
Consider Jesus’ answer to Phillip who asked to see the Father, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
Or consider this famous quote from St. Augustine, “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you.”
We long to see the face of God and to be close to Him, only because He is already within us and inviting us to see Him and know how close He already is.
With Saint Faustina, on this glorious Feast of Divine Mercy, hear Him whisper in your soul how much He loves you and desires you to have the fullness of joy.
Pax,
Fr. John Mosimann