October 8, 2024, Class Update: Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition

Greetings everyone!

Our opening prayer was the prayer that appears at the end of the Holy Spirit Litany at this link.

Most of our class time on October 8 was spent watching the documentary Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition.  It features stories of those in the MLB about the role of faith in their lives.

Featured are Mike Sweeney, Rich Donnelly, Mike Piazza, and Jack McKeon.  There's also a segment in which various players talk about the Eucharist.  You can click those links to view those segments.

We concluded class with this Holy Spirit prayer, at the end of a different version of the Litany.

I asked everyone to pray that prayer once a day until we meet again as a way to join in my celebration of the 19th anniversary of my Confirmation on October 15.

Looking ahead, the plan is to spend some time with Pope St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body in our upcoming class on October 22, and to consider the foundations of the Church.

As usual, please feel free to reach out to me with questions, feedback, etc.

We remain connected as One Church, bound together by the Holy Spirit:

All my relations.

God's blessings,

Paul

We're on God's team, playing to reach Heaven, with the help of the Holy Spirit, represented by the dove on the stage background behind me in Lucas Oil Stadium, following the NEC closing Mass. A fellow pilgrim photographed me inside as I exited.

October 1, 2024, Class Update: Scripture

Greetings everyone!

Our focus in class on October 1 was on the Bible, coming one day after the Feast of St. Jerome, who composed a Latin translation of the Bible.

During the first week of October is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.  The song "All Creatures of Our God and King" is based on one of his writings.  I played the song as sung during the opening procession of the National Eucharistic Congress concluding Mass.  (If you click the link, it will start within the first 5 minutes with the English verses before switching to Spanish.)

After a fun activity with library books, we watched a video in which Chris Stefanick explains the significance of Scripture.

Then we reviewed looking up passages of Scripture and looked at these passages:

Psalm 119:105

Deuteronomy 6:1-9

Matthew 5:1-12

Everyone wrote phrases from Matthew 5:1-12.

Per the words of Deuteronomy 6, which says to bind the words of God to us, which became the Jewish custom of phylacteries, I invited everyone to tape those words to me.

Thank you to Hector for this photo.

God speaks to us in His Words, and by keeping them close to us, we walk on the path toward Him.

Everyone took those index cards with words of the Bible home for the week.

Our closing prayer was the Taize song "Take, o Take me as I am".

May the Word dwell in us, and draw us closer to God.

We remain connected as One Church by faith in God, revealed in the Bible:

All my relations.

God's blessings,

Paul

September 24, 2024, Class Update: The Holy Spirit and Our Mission

Greetings everyone!

During our class on September 24, we welcomed our new class aide, Hadley Kalas, a junior at Fenwick.

For our opening prayer, we prayed with the hymn "Be Thou My Vision".  This video is performed by two sisters, Abby and Annalie.

September 24 was the day that I participated in a Confirmation retreat 3 weeks before my Confirmation Mass.  Then we considered what we know about the Holy Spirit, even as Paul shared teh celebration of his Confirmation with special treats.

The Holy Spirit is the presence of God dwelling within us.

As the Gospel according to St. Matthew states, Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.  In the final chapter of Matthew, Jesus sent forth the apostles, and declared that He would be with them always, a promise fulfilled when the Holy Spirit came, a story described in Acts 2. 

The Holy Spirit sends us on our mission to proclaim the Good News that God saves and that God is at work among us.

This mission has been fulfilled in so many ways throughout the centuries.

Spanish priests came to Mexico in the 16th Century to catechize the indigenous Aztecs. One of those people was San Juan Diego, who played a pivotal role in evangelization in Mexico.  I played a clip in the last two minutes of the first episode of The Saints podcast series about San Juan Diego.

San Padre Junipero Serra was a Franciscan priest from Spain who went to Mexico in the 18th Century and then founded several missions in what is now the state of California, which are now major cities.

Above and below are photos at the Mission San Diego in California.  I visited there with friends back on July 16, 2022, the anniversary of its founding.  Below is a photo of me by a sign out front, taken by one of my friends.

We have the opportunity to testify to how God is at work in our lives, like in this news interview with Grace McCallum, an Olympic gymnast at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

We finished class with the song "Come Rest on Us" with a video of it from a NEC session.  (Here's another music video of the song.)

As usual, please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, feedback, etc.

May the Holy Spirit be at work in you, as we remain connected as One Church, brought alive by that Spirit:

All my relations.

God's blessings,

Paul