Getting Ready for Pentecost

This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday.

The color for the feast is RED. If you want to wear something red to Mass this weekend, that would be fine. If you don't, don't let that keep you from celebrating in great style this wonderful feast ending the Easter season, and commemorating the beginning of the Church.

Some people in the church today yearn for a return to the church of yesteryear: they want the church today to return to the ways things were back in 1957. Some folks want us to return to the ways things were in 35 A.D. Some folks want something like the church in 1492.

That's all nice.

But I wonder if Pentecost is really a celebration that calls us to look to the future!

Sure, it's nice to look back to the "good ole days" and to remember with fondness the simpler ways of the "old style"......

But maybe we're being called to some new ways of being Church......

Maybe, perhaps, the Spirit calls us to evaluate, and discern its presence in every age.

Personally, I think that the Church in the Long Branch area, is being called to evaluate, and discern some future directions that may look very different from the "traditional" ways of thinking about parish, and even Catholic Education.

Let's continue to pray for the leadership of our parish, as we continue on the paths of our Deanery Study. Let's pray together that the Holy Spirit will lead us to a better appreciation of the ways necessary to serve ALL of the Catholics in the Deanery. Let's expand our horizons, and together "Sing a New Church" into being.