From the Pastor

Dear friends in the Risen Lord,
 
     The news of the dreadful loss of life at the border of Israel and the multiple bombings of churches in Indonesia—one of them an Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church —affected me deeply this week.
 
     My prayer led me to read once again Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Peace.” In fact, the world’s violence and the growing coarseness and divisiveness of political discourse here and in other countries evoke in many of us a longing for some sort of peace that is more stable, more longstanding than what is offered “piecemeal,” to borrow Hopkins’s word.
 
     I hope that you will find this poem edifying at Pentecost, and that it may lead you, as it leads me, to pray for a peace that is substantive and divine. Such peace is not found in the fleeting power reversals and violent victories of human action, but in the surrender of such power and the foregoing of violence that the Gospel calls the human family to embrace. Indeed that peace is a proper noun (Peace), as Hopkins indicates, and that Peace is Christ.
 
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure Peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
 
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He Comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.