Advent - Time for Reflection

Advent is the Church season that allows us the time to reflect upon the awesome gift of Jesus who chose to become one of us because he loved us so much. 

The culture we all live in however, is bound up in endless energy and activity – it is involved in everything but time for reflection.  We too, get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the holiday season: shopping, decorating, cooking, cleaning, etc.  We don’t have time for the luxury of just sitting in the presence of God.  Yet, how are we preparing ourselves to receive Christ’s gift?

Instead of offering another program for you to attend this Advent, I would like to challenge you to take just 6 minutes a day this season to sit in silent prayer and reflection.

The weekend of November 17/18, our three Churches made available the “Little Blue Book.”  This book provides an opportunity for you and your family to enjoy one of the Church’s oldest traditions of prayer called lectio divina – sacred reading.  In only 6 minutes you can read a short Scripture passage and simply let God speak to you through the words, guiding you to reflections that sometimes seem to come from nowhere.

People are often surprised at how easy it is to pray this way, and how deep such prayer can be.

It can change your day…change your life.

Blessings on your Advent/Christmas reflections.

Carol Burczyk – Pastoral Associate

Welcome to our Year of Faith Blog!

As we continue on our journey in the Year of Faith that began on October 11th and will continue until the feast of Christ the King on November 24, 2013, we thought it was an appropriate time to enter the 21st century and start a blog for our tri-parish cluster. The purpose of this blog is to share resources that the staff and parishioners have found helpful in our foray into the "New Evangelization" as well as a place for staff, parish members and others to share why their faith is important, why they stay committed to the Catholic faith and/or what they love about being Catholic.

For this inaugural post, we invite parishioner input as to what else you would like to see and invite your submissions to our blog to be shared with the cluster. We also urge you to explore individually and as families a few of the excellent resources we have found and that are listed below as we embark on this journey together.

To learn what Pope Benedict the XVI has said about the Year of Faith, read the Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei.  If video is more your style, watch the report on the announcement of the Year of Faith:

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee has an excellent series for the Year of Faith entitled C4: Ignite Your Catholic Faith featuring Bishop Donald Hying. These are short 2-3 minute videos exploring different themes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church in an engaging format. Check out the latest video: Is the Bible True? (As a Youth Minister, this comes up all the time from teenagers and young adults so my guess is there is still a lot of confusion out there - so please do me a favor, watch this and share it with someone questioning the "truthiness" (sorry - cheap Steven Colbert rip off) of the Bible!

If you would like to see the other videos, they are all available on the Archdiocese of Milwaukee web site here. (You can even subscribe to an RSS feed to stay on top of them!)

We will email the link to this blog for the next few submissions, but if you don't want to miss them, make sure you sign up using whatever email is best. And in the spirit of the New Evangelization, pass it on!

In Christ's Peace,
Maureen Rotramel
Youth and Young Adult Minister/Blog Editor