Dear Family!

I thank you for your generous support of the second collection for Turkey and Syria. Your prayers and monetary help certainly is a source of inspiration to them as they rebuild their lives. I also thank our Faith Formation Director Escarlen Duran and all our Faith Formation Teachers in preparing our children for sacraments especially for Confirmation this year. A special word of thanks to our Principal and the teachers who helped prepare our Confirmation children this year. It was a memorable mass with our Bishop officiating with our parish community.

At the beginning of the Lent, in the 1st Sunday we are given powerful readings that reveal to us the foundational aspects of sin and God’s continual grace in inviting us to holiness in freedom. In the first reading we read about the original sin. The woman took the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Taking this fruit of this tree is “equivalent to making a grab for moral autonomy. It is way of saying, I will decide what is right and what is wrong and I am not going to be told by anyone else. It is a form of idolatry.” (Geoffrey Plant).

Satan compromised our first parents’ trust in God and introduced doubt in them. (CCC 538). It presents us with a naked truth that we are so easily distracted in conceding to a lie than holding on to the limitless love of God. We came from God and we are created in God’s image and in a way we are already ‘like gods’, yet we deny God’s love and fail to respond to it by believing in a lie that come from father of lies.

Satan’s lie - ‘You certainly will not die! Death did enter the world through Adam’s sin. Can we restore us to God’s covenantal relationship after we wounded God’s heart? The Second Reading teaches us that only God can do that. Only God can remove the sin and heal the wound the sin caused.

We are always tempted by the devil and call the evils of our society the ‘new normal’. Ash Wednesday is the first day we witnessed God wiping the ‘I’ (our selfishness, greed, temptations, hatred and harmful desires) horizontally by tracing the Cross on our foreheads. Let us keep that image all through the season of Lent and beyond.

We also had a meeting regarding our plan to form ’72 Disciples’ in our parish to cater to the spiritual needs of our parish and beyond with informative spiritual inputs and sharing and ways to ministry. You can always welcome to join the group - call the office for more information or talk to any clergy in our parish.

Fr. Antony

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