“The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.” Ps 145

Dear parishioners,

God really does provide. Not just to his chosen ones, but to all living things. Let’s make of this summer a time to take in something at least of the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and to reflect on the impoverishing impact we are having on it, and how I, we, as a family, can become a part of the solution, as opposed to being a part of the problem.

I have nothing particular to report this week in terms of pandemic-related parish measures, so I have the luxury of making my own modest contribution to this day that Pope Francis has asked us to mark annually as the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly.

I simply want to share with you what makes the elderly so precious in my eyes. It is simple. They give me hope. When we are young, because we lack experience, when something bad happens, we tend to assume that “the good times are over”, that this bad thing that has happened to us a game-changer, for the worst. That we, or those we love, will not recover from the blows we are dealt. That our life, from now on, will be sad. But early on in life, I realized that this assumption was wrong. What made me realize this is the simple testimony of seeing elderly people laughing, smiling, or even just serene. I knew that all of these elderly people had experienced very dark days in their long lives. Some had lost their farm. Some battled with cancer or watched a loved one die of it. Some lost a child. Like all of us, sooner or later, they experienced hardship. Yet here they were, laughing, or smiling, or just serene. This told me, and tells me still, that the will to live and to be happy is a very resilient, powerful force. Simply put, we humans tend to have the ability to bounce back from incredibly harsh experiences. It’s always reasonable to hope that if the sun isn’t shining today, it might well be shining again tomorrow. This is no small wisdom to hold in life. I owe it, we all owe it, to the smiles on our seniors’ faces. Blessed be God for the presence in our lives of people who have been in the dark places where we are now, and lived on to smile again.

The institution of this feast is timely, coming as it does in the year of the pandemic, in which many thousands of elderly died in long term care homes in our country. Of course, they died of Covid. But they also died in part because of conditions in the long term care homes that were wrong, of which we always knew that they were wrong, but about which nothing was done to correct them. By the grace of God, may one of the blessings of this pandemic be a collective acknowledgement of the failings of our system of care for the elderly, and a firm resolve to act now, to create spaces in which our elderly, and ourselves eventually, can grow old and die without fear, in peace.

To mark this occasion, we have created very nice prayer cards specially conceived for prayer by an elderly person. Please take one for yourself, or for an elderly person in your life who you know would appreciate it.

Finally, on a completely different topic, I want to promote an excellent article by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, omi, that can be found at ronrolheiser.com. Click on this title, and you will see a series of articles. It is the second in the series. The title is “Why stay in the Church?” It is simply excellent, and not too long. It could come in handy on the day when someone in your life summons you to justify the fact that you are still in the Church…

Keep safe, God bless, Fr. Guy