The Family Foundation School Catholic Community Bulletin
Pauca Verba (a few words)
Here’s our addressed envelope to Smile Train. We’re ready to send our gift that will surgically repair the cleft palette of a little child somewhere in the world where pregnant moms, living in poverty, suffer vitamin deficiencies that frequently result in birth deformities. Without the surgery, the little child would be considered un-employable and be consigned to a lifetime of poverty and suffering. So if you’ve kept the sugar fast, God bless your effort and sacrifice. You have one week left to go. You may break your fast after the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night!
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Today is Passion Sunday. It is commonly called Palm Sunday. We begin Holy Week, remembering the Lord’s entrance into the Holy City of Jerusalem where the great drama of his love will unfold. Look at the icon-cover of your bulletin this week: it tells the gospel story we will hear at the start of Mass. Some people have put their coats on the ground for Jesus to pass over. Others are waving branches in the air as a sign of greeting a returning victor! They think Jesus will lead a military victory.
We are each given a little springtime bundle of pussy willow, palm and boxwood – tied with a red ribbon to recall the Lord’s Precious Blood. With these tied branches we join in the solemn and joyful greeting of the Lord Jesus centuries ago. As the branches are blessed, we should place them in a most special and safe place in our dorm. When we no longer want the branches they should be returned to Father Stephen. Never put them in the garbage.
Oh, Jesus, with my bundle of tied branches, I greet you this happy spring morning with the Hebrew children centuries before. And I thank you for the gift of your love – your passionate love – which this week will give me the gift of your Holy Body and Blood, which will suffer loneliness in the Gethsemane Garden, which will undergo arrest and the sadness of jail, an unfair trial and the disappearance of friends, the exhaustion and pain of Calvary. You embraced me and the whole world from your cross, and ever since have been leading me in love to the joy and life-promise of Easter. Be comforted this week, Jesus, as I stay close to you in love. AMEN.
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What joy to share! On Holy Thursday night we will re-enact the Lord Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. We will join our friends who are receiving their First Holy Communion and remember, with the most grateful hearts, the gift Jesus has given us – not an idea or even just his word – but the gift of himself in his real Body and Blood. Like a mother, Jesus feeds us through all our life, in all the twists and turns, all the way to heaven!
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On Good Friday we join together again for part II of the sacred three days. We hear Saint John’s account of the Passion sung by Paul, Phil and Father Stephen. We’ll make sung intercession for the whole world. Bringing all our lives, with every struggle and pain and heart-longing, up the aisle to venerate the wood of the cross from which Jesus has loved the world into new life. The Holy Communion we receive on Good Friday was consecrated the night before. On Holy Saturday Night (part III) we hear the long readings from the Old Testament leading up to the account of the Jesus’ Easter Rising! Good friends meet Jesus for the first time in the water of Baptism. The “old man” “old woman” is drowned symbolically and they are raised up to become new Christ-persons: anointed, dressed, enlightened, sealed, and nourished in their own first communion. Easter is too big to celebrate in one day – so it is lived out first in an octave of 8 days – and then spills over into a season of 40 more!
