A Vision for the Future
Fr. Paul’s Letter to the Jesuit Parish Family
May 17, 2024
People of God,
Happy Pentecost! Today we proclaim and celebrate the powerful gift of the Holy Spirit given to us by the risen Christ. Through our reflection on the Holy Spirit, we stand in awe of how God’s presence is revealed through all of creation. We marvel at the times in our own lives we have witnessed God pour out the Holy Spirit upon us. It is little wonder why this feast has been called “the birthday of the Church”. In gratitude, we come to understand how we are one Body, and one Spirit in Christ.
In this same Spirit, today we reveal the outcome of our quest to articulate a vision statement for our Parish Family. As you know, on the Feast of St. Francis Xavier, December 3, 2023, our two parishes were united for the first time as the Jesuit Parish Family. Over the past several months members of both parishes have met to discern and name our shared vision as we grow in our unique, vibrant, expressions of Catholic worship.
We began in January with a retreat, immersing ourselves into the variety of ways we experience the Holy Spirit. The retreat was followed by three successive monthly Saturday meetings. In February, 110 people from both parishes came together to pray and talk about our hopes for the future of our parishes. From there, we developed a working group of around 40 people who met in March and April to continue discerning how we could articulate our shared desires. After hours of planning, prayer, and conversation, we articulated the vision that will guide us over the next decade.
As we learned in the process, an effective vision statement has four qualities: it calls us to dream big, calls us to action, is Spirit-led, and it inspires us. The biggest dream of all, is that we might be transformed by God’s Spirit, and consciously participate in God’s work in this world.
Thus, our vision statement begins with a meditation on the nature of being. Christ and God are both revealed as “I AM”; our very being is caught up into Christ’s. We are being transformed in Christ, and we desire to consciously participate in the transformation God brings into this world. Our Being is bound to His, and we yearn for all of our parish work to participate in the transformation in this world.
We are transformed in the Body of Christ. As our bodies absorb the physical properties of the Eucharist, the True Presence of Christ transforms our souls. If we are what we eat, we are the Body of Christ, His heart and His hands. We receive His presence, and we become one with His presence in the world, and we are united as brothers and sisters in Him.
We recognize in this world our constant need for hope. We recognize it is in the Body of Christ that all our hopes find fulfillment. In the voices of division and conflict, we labor with Christ to bear healing within the Body. We seek in our daily works to encounter those hearts in need of hope and healing, bearing the Gospel to all in need.
In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius showed us the way to let our imaginations and desires lead us into an encounter with the Love of God through the revelation of the Son. Our purpose is to bear the Gospel and become disciples of Christ, bearing in our limited way what Christ bore. As we pick up our own cross to follow Him, we can only do so by first understanding that we are beloved by Him beyond all measure.
In John’s Gospel today, we hear a very physical and personal image: Jesus breathed on them! And then he said, Receive the Holy Spirit! It is the same Spirit we celebrate here today, and that has guided us this far. The next step will be to invite each leadership group and ministry group at each parish to pray with and reflect on the vision statement together, listening for the ways the Spirit is moving us to respond. Our two parishes will continue to live out our shared vision in different ways, even as we share in the same Spirit that Christ is always giving to us. Let us together breathe life into our new vision statement so that it can help reveal how God is calling us forward as the Jesuit Parish Family!
Much peace and all good,
Fr. Paul Lickteig, S.J.