Friends,
This is the first newsletter of the little church that meets at St Joe's.
I've been calling it “Our Little Church”.... OLC... maybe we'll be “Our
Lady of Compassion”!
After meeting just once a month this autumn, we began meeting weekly at the end of November, and now can be found every Sunday at 11 am at St Joe's. We are a very tiny group! But I feel myself rooted here, committed to whatever this church turns out to be... kind of like the commitment one has to a child. I remember the feeling of holding my newborn babies, wondering who they would be, and knowing I would be with them helping to both shape and discover the people that they would become. That's how I feel about this church, too. May it be whatever God is dreaming for it.
This infant church already has an outreach program, or at least, the dream of one. In the New Year we will begin learning to celebrate Mass together in Spanish, with the intention of bringing Mass to some of the migrant workers in outlying towns who are not going to church because they are afraid of being deported. If they don't feel safe going to church, then let church come to them! If you would like to be part of this, please let me know.
This coming Sunday, December 19, we will celebrate the fourth Sunday of Advent, and the Feast of the Holy Family on December 26. I will be in El Salvador for a week, beginning December 27, and Deacon Patti LaRosa will come to do a communion service on January 2 when I am gone.
I am sending this first newsletter to anyone that I think might like to know what we are doing. If you would like to keep getting it, please send me an email. If I don't hear from you, I won't send it in the future.
I do not know where God is leading but I know that God is leading, and that is enough. In the New Year we will do some advertising, and see if maybe we can grow a little! Attached to this message is a piece I wrote about our Mass on the Second Sunday of Advent, if you'd like to know what a typical Sunday is like at Our Little Church!
Blessings and light and peace and love, and thank you for your prayers -
love to all,
Chava
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown!”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”
- Marie Louise Haskins