How is your Lent going? I’ve got to admit, with this job, I’ve been playing catch-up for all the years I did the minimum, basically from being busy with family, but mostly out of ignorance, and because
“We never did that in my family growing up!…”
Like many of you, I just did what my family did growing up. Give up something (and try to remember the commitment) and no meat on Fridays. How many times did I pick the pepperoni off of the pizza?? As the years go on, and you re-listen to the Gospel and homilies, you hear something new, that you didn’t realize back then, that you didn’t learn from or do with your family, and you gain more understanding. Grow in faith.
Like Stations of the Cross. I don’t think we ever went as a family, probably because we had a farm and had a few dairy cows needed milking during that time of day come to think of it. But I went with my Catholic school, so I had some familiarity with the devotion. The previous blog has more on stations including some history and what we did with stations last time at youth and family night.
We invite you to attend our regular parish Stations of the Cross with your family as part of family faith formation experience. That way your kids will say in future, “Oh yeah, we did that with my family growing up.” There’s one tomorrow, Friday, 7pm Varysburg. They alternate locations each Friday. (P.S. Thank you very much to all the youth who are helping serve at fish fry’s!)
OR go to our WACY Shadow Stations,
a more immersive life-size visual and musical version, (maybe not for the youngest children because it’s in the dark. You know your kids best.) It goes about an hour. We only present these 3 times each year because of hauling equipment.
It might be good to come to one to see what it’s all about before your kids participate in the Varysburg one on April 8th:
Mar 25th, in Perry at St. Isadore, 7:30pm address: 8 Park St.
April 1st in Buffalo, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 115 O’Connell St, 7:30 pm
April 8th in Varysburg, at our St. Joseph’s site, with our own faith formation youth participating in the shadows.
This presentation starts at 8pm due to sunset time. We will all practice on Thursday, the night before, and set up. Friday we will arrive early for pizza and last minute preparations. (There is no SSJA fish fry this night).
When you attend these devotions together with your family, that’s what I’ve heard called “sticky faith”. It sticks with you. You continue the tradition with your kids, they remember as they get older “that’s just what we always did in our family.” Later, as children get older, we put 2+2 together and dive way deeper in understanding “why”.
This year I’m trying a bunch of Lent challenges. The big one I’m learning from Marlene is that you’ve just got to invite people. So I’m trying to connect with family and friends and invite them back to church or to some Lenten challenge. I wanted to get 40 people, for the 40 days, but it might be a stretch. Just a little invitation, especially if they just haven’t come back yet from the pandemic excuse. Others, well, it may have been decades… For them, I got some to sign up for Flocknotes and join the Lenten text Challenge group. It only goes a couple more days – I think it was for 25 days instead of 40 for some reason:
Today’s challenge is “Tell your spouse, kids, parents, siblings or coworker 3 nice things today.”
There are also Sunday gospel video homilies from Bishop Robert Barron on the Flocknote group titled Engage Lenten Videos via email. If you have someone in mind who might be open to receiving them, you can have them sign up, or you can sign up yourself and forward them. Text SSJA to 84576 and go through the same process as before, confirming your phone and email, and just follow links through to the parish ministry group lists, to select the one to join. (If you get a non-parishioner to sign up, they can ignore any parish-wide Flocknotes that may come through, like for example, for the current survey. We usually don’t send many notes to the parish-wide list)
The challenge today on the Lenten calendar from the Rice Bowls we handed out is :
“Today, make a sacrifice and give up candy and junk food. Give 50 cents for each healthy food you ate today."
Hmmm, I’m up t $2.50 already! Oh, and I’m totally trying the Dahl recipe from the Rice Bowl poster. Looks delish! We’ll collect the money from the Rice Bowls after Easter, until the Family mass May 1st. More info on that later.
Family Mass April 3rd, 8am, with Catered Breakfast to Follow. Please RSVP here or to the Flocknote
During this mass we will have the enrollment for the Confirmation youth.
The breakfast following this mass will be catered by Jen Holt, assisted by the Social Committee, and we respectfully request an RSVP with the number of family members attending the breakfast, in order for the caterer to prepare. If the link below does not allow you to enter numbers, reply anyway and we'll figure it out! Thanks!
Parish Survey
Father George requests all Confirmed adult family members, ages 17 and over,fill out the online survey about our parish from CLI Catholic Leadership Institute. It will inform future organizational and program changes in the coming years that align with Road to Renewal. It will take some time, perhaps 20 to 30 min to fill out. It’s mostly clicking a bubble type thing, but may take some thought as to which best fits your thought about our parish. The best way to find it is on our
SS Joachim and Anne Parish home page http://ssjoachimanne.org/
As you prepare yourself and your family for Lenten season sacrament of reconciliation/penance, here is a helpful video for all ages the Diocese of Rochester recently posted in their Family Zone newsletter:
Thank You! You are enough and you know enough to pass on your faith to your children! Start small and Grow with God!