Congratulations to all graduates! Let the caps fly and the celebrations begin! In between all the hugs, the moving of tassels, the receiving of diplomas, and snapping of photos and videos, we record all these special moments in our minds and hearts forever. This Friday, we celebrated graduation at Holy Family Catholic Academy. We are so proud of all our graduates as they reach this significant milestone. Fr. Terry, Fr. Rich, Principal Kate O’Brien, Assistant Principle Laura Clark, all our teachers and supporting staff are so proud of your achievements.
Congratulations to all other graduates from their respective grammar schools, high schools, and colleges. All our graduates should feel proud of themselves as well. We are blessed to celebrate all our graduates and their achievements, perseverance and successes. It’s one of the most important times to reflect on and give thanks for all the young people in our lives and feel good as parents and mentors. Graduation is a coming of age, a right-of-passage, an official way to recognize this important step into their next stage of life. Congratulations All Graduates!
As we honor our graduates over the next several weeks, this weekend we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Today’s scripture readings remind us that God is love and God is relationship. God is therefore community, family, parish, friendship, hospitality. In proclaiming a Trinity of relationships, we proclaim that the reality of our everyday dealings with each other is not a “secular” event, but the stuff of church, and the “stuff” of God. Ron Rolheiser sums this up well where he writes: “…God is not, first of all, a formula, a dogma, a creedal statement, or a metaphysics that demands our assent. God is a flow of living relationships, a trinity, a family of life that we can enter, taste, breathe within, and let flow through us. God is not an abstraction. But the one in whom everything and everyone has their being.”
We are all held in life within a trinity of love. It is in the everyday reality of our dealings with each other that the Trinity lives: at our dinner tables, or even over a bottle of good wine, in our arguments, disagreements, and frustrations with each other, and in the simple giving and receiving of hospitality, warmth, openness and tenderness. None of these is ever “secular,” no matter how earthly they may seem. These dealings with each other are the “stuff” of God. God is relationship! The Trinity is alive and well in all of us until the end of time.
Since we were all created by God, the Feast of the Holy Trinity is also a renewal of our mission as a parish community to live in communion with God and one another. The call to live both with and for others means being a people who welcome one another and bearing witness to the beauty of the Gospel, but also a commission to live in mutual love towards one another, sharing joys and sorrows, learning to ask for and grant forgiveness, and valuing our different charisms. Pope Francis told the pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, “our being created in the image and likeness of God-communion calls us to understand ourselves as beings-in-relation, and to live interpersonal relationships in solidarity and reciprocal love.”
The Gospel reading from John is taken from a portion of Jesus’ discourse shortly before his Passion, in which Christ outlines the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Knowing that he must fulfill the Father’s plan through his own death and resurrection, Jesus assures the disciples that he will not abandon them, “because his mission will be continued by the Holy Spirit.” May God bless and strengthen our relationships with one another on this Feast of the Holy Trinity.
(Fr. Rich Jakubik, Holy Family’s Associate Pastor, is writing this column while Fr. Terry is away.)