A Message from the Pastor…………………….
The Baptismal Font is being moved back into the foyer. On Holy Saturday morning we moved it out into the entrance so the Baptism that night of Denis Tahirovic could be seen. In the meantime, something surprising happened: people began dipping into the water of the font for a blessing. No one directed this, but it’s a sound liturgical instinct, as it ties the blessing of oneself directly to Baptism. We’ll keep the font out from the wall in the foyer so anyone can still bless themselves with it. We’d like a longer-term solution of a proper Baptismal font that accommodates adults as well as children.
This Sunday Gospel brings a wonderful meaning from the words themselves. In
the familiar Good Samaritan story, Jesus describes the good man’s compassion upon seeing the injured man as a physical, guts reaction, as I learned in graduate theology when I studied the gospels in Greek. The word he used is “esplachnisthai”—his insides moved. It means that compassion is not just a thought or feeling, but is built into us physically. We all know times when we have a visceral reaction to someone’s suffering, in our family or even in news media. There is it, our very physical insides churning and reacting like the Good Samaritan’s. It’s how God built in our compassion for one another. In order to be callous toward one another or some more remote story, we actually have to turn this function off.
So the violence we keep hearing, shootings etc.—we need to specifically not get used to it, but notice our revulsion at yet another story. And I don’t know, but maybe if we keep training our children and youth to look at those they may do some type of harm to, it could grow in our culture to be in touch with our physical reaction to suffering we may cause, and to reach out in compassion to those obviously suffering.
Fr. Sebastian