May 18th, 2008
Today we celebrate the basic mystery of our Christian faith, the mystery of the Trinity. Every time we make the sign of the cross we express our belief in the Blessed Trinity. After the Our Father and the Hail Mary our most common prayer is “glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever.” We begin every Mass with the greeting Paul used in his letter to the Corinthians, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you.” These are all expressions of our faith in this great mystery. In dealing with any of the mysteries of our faith we have to remember that a mystery is not something of which can know nothing, a mystery is something of which we cannot know everything. Even when we see God face to face we will still not be able to comprehend God. The lesser cannot contain the greater.
In the teachings of Jesus we come to know that the inner life of God is a life of relationships. The Father loves the Son and the love that binds them together is the Holy Spirit.
In our first reading God told Moses how he wanted to be known, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. God proved that steadfast love when God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn us but to embrace us and bring us to everlasting life. Last week we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit upon us all, a Spirit who would teach us the truths of God and keep us faithful to God.
All our lives we are involved in relationships. We are made in the image and likeness of God in that we are able to enter into loving and life giving relationship. In the beginning God said ‘it is not good for you to be alone’. As St. Paul reminds us, “the life and death of each of us has its influence on others.” We cannot go through life untouched or untouching. We are conceived in a relationship of love, we enjoy an intimate nine month relationship with our mother, we are born into a family, we grow up making and losing friends, we have neighbours and co-workers; we chose a life long friend and companion in the sacrament of marriage.
We are in relationship with all those who share our Christian Catholic faith. As we pray at Mass, “May all of us who share in the body and blood of Christ be brought together in unity by the Holy Spirit.”
As we all know relationships can be tricky things. There are loving and life giving relationships and there are manipulative and abusive relationships. There are relationships that help us grow and mature and relationships that can make us submissive and dependent.
The quality and health of our relationship with others determines the quality and health of our relationship with God. Love one another as I have loved you… by this all will know that you are mine, if you have love one for the other. As often as you did these things to one of these the least of my brothers and sisters you did it to me.
In recent times we come to have a deeper appreciation of the relationship we have with the rest of God’s good creation. We are a strand in the web of life that makes up the life systems of our home the Earth. We did not weave this web we are a strand in it and what we do to the web we do to ourselves. Slowly we are beginning to realize that we are family with the rest of life on earth, slowly we are beginning to realize the negative impact we are having on the life systems of the planet, and slowly we are beginning to realize the need we have to heal that relationship.
God made us to be relational as God is relational. As we celebrate this mystery of the Trinity we can pray for ourselves and for each other that we blessed to appreciate the mystery and the possibilities of our own relationships, with God, with the family of the church, with friends and strangers and with the family of life that vitalizes planet Earth. We pray that in all these relationships we will be sources of life, love, growth and healing.
| Posted in Homily |
Covenant House is the country’s largest emergency shelter for street kids. With your support of ShareLife, 2224 young people were reached through Covenant House in 2007, providing food, clothing, counseling and recreation programs.
With your support, 22 people graduated from the long-term housing program at Covenant house, with 4 moving on to University and 18 moving into independent or supportive housing. For more information about the 34 Agencies funded by ShareLife visit our website at www.sharelife.org
2007 ShareLife Total: $164,652.60 2008 ShareLife to Date: $128,633.00
Tuesday evening, May 20 at 7:30 PM Topic: Catholics in Nazi Germany
Wednesday morning, May 21 at 10:30 AM Topic: St. Paul – Pastor and Theologian
On Monday, May 19, the Parish Office will be closed for Victoria Day.
This coming week, Fr. Bernard, Fr. Steve and I will be in Hartford Conn. attending a very important meeting of the Passionist Community. Like every religious community, the Passionists are faced with aging members and aging buildings and must make decisions as regards both. Please pray for the Passionists as they meet this coming week. Fr. Paul
Thank you for your generosity to the Collection for the Pope’s Pastoral Works. $2,474.74 has been collected and will be used wherever the Pope feels it is most needed.
Total: $7,425.61
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St Gabriel’s Parish will again be taking part in this year’s Doors Open Toronto on Sunday, May 25th from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM. For more information, please call the Parish Office.
Our new activities kick off on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 with a day of golf for all parishioners at the glorious Glen Eagle Golf Club. Individual players as well as foursomes are welcome and we have a great mix of both men and women players. The event is open to both casual and competitive golfers and is followed by a magnificent Dinner and Awards Banquet.
Catholic Family Services are looking for volunteers to help with fundraising events and to serve on the Board of Directors. For more information, please contact Mark Evans at Catholic Family Services by phone at 416-921-1163 or by email at mevans@cfsofto.org.
As news reports continue to filter out of Myanmar (Burma) following the devastation of Cyclone Nargis on May 3, more than 20,000 people are already confirmed dead. More than 40,000 more are reported missing and as many as 1 million people have been left homeless, according to the World Food Program.
The ShareLife office will be accepting donations to support humanitarian relief efforts underway in Myanmar, assisting in the provision of food, shelter, clean water, and medical assistance. The Catholic Church’s official relief body, Caritas Internationalis, is coordinating the efforts for its 162 national members, working with staff in the region. As has been the case in the past, contributions will be channelled through the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development & Peace, the Caritas representative organization in Canada. Those wishing to help may do so in the following ways:
We offer our prayers for the thousands of families affected by this natural disaster. Thank you for your ongoing efforts to serve the poor and marginalized both here at home and around the world.
Be assured that ShareLife does not apply any administrative fees to humanitarian relief contributions, ensuring as much money as possible is directed toward assistance of those in crisis.
Archbishop Collins Auxiliary Bishops Mr. John McGrath
Two of our young parishioners, high school students Robin Ivory and Colleen Shea, will be traveling to Kenya this summer as part of a volunteer group organized by the Toronto Catholic District School Board in conjunction with Free the Children. They will be helping to build and supply a school in a remote tribal area, and are selling raffle tickets for a variety of great prizes to help offset the cost of materials. Robin and Colleen and their families have been active parishioners of St. Gabriel’s for many years, and we encourage you to support their efforts.
Tickets are $10 each or 3 for $25 and will be available after all the Masses May 24/25 and May31/June 1.
Your prepared chicken rice casseroles (frozen please) will be collected at the Masses next weekend for delivery to the Good Shepherd Centre. More volunteers are encouraged to get a copy of the casserole recipe and a pan and give it a try. For more information, please contact Irene Albrecht at 416 221-2791.
Every four years, Catholic faithful from around the world are invited to gather together to reflect on and celebrate the great mystery of the Eucharist during the International Eucharistic Congress. From June 15-22, 2008, it is expected that between 12,000 to 15,000 bishops, priests, deacons, religious and lay people will gather in Quebec City to come to a deeper appreciation of “the eucharist, gift of God for the life of the world,” the theme of this 49th Congress. There will be a special collection for this Congress on May 24/25. Envelopes are in the pews.
LIVERight and join our local community Butterfly 5K Run/Walk in the East Don River Park in memory of Olivia Barron. Join the fun and help raise awareness and funds for children’s liver disease research on Sunday, June 8. Register at www.runningroom.com. If you would like to contact us or pledge Olivia’s brother, please call 416 – 490 – 0134 or email us at p.barron@sympatico.ca.
The Society of St. Vincent de Paul will be collecting gently used clothing and household linens for those in need on the weekend of June 14Th and 15Th. There is a particular need for textiles and footwear. A St. Vincent de Paul truck will be parked on the upper parking lot opposite the garden. Volunteers will assist with loading before and after each of the Masses on Saturday and Sunday.
The Society of St. Vincent de Paul operates Marygrove camp for disadvantaged girls ages 5 to 13. Over 1,100 children attend camp each summer. There will be a second collection for Marygrove Camp on June 15/16.
Fred Speed, a long-time parishioner, is offering to teach English to small groups of new immigrant women. The groups will be between four and six persons. It is anticipated that classes, with an initial focus on conversational English, will be offered one afternoon a week here at the parish. They will be targeted to immigrants with a beginner level of English. Details about the classes may be found on the bulletin boards. Those interested, please contact Fatima Lee at (416) 221 – 8866, Ext. 228 for further information and/or to register.
| Posted in Bulletin |
May 12th, 2008
On May 6, 2008, some of the classes from St. Gabriel’s school visited the Jaffari Islamic Centre and Temple Har Zion in Thornhill. They had an enjoyable time with the Iman and Rabbi Cory Weiss. Temple Har Zion had its beginnings at St. Gabriel’s lower church back in 1997 and St. Gabriel’s and Har Zion have had an ongoing relationship ever since.
| Posted in Events |
May 11th, 2008
Many of the thoughts in this sermon come from an article by Fr. Ron Rolheiser published recently in the Register.
Can you remember what life in the church was like about 50 years ago? We were a pretty cohesive community. If you are new comers to Canada, remember how your faith community back home was like. If you come from a country where Catholics were a minority, you pretty well stuck together and supported one another in your faith.
But here in Canada – in the good old days – we lived in a culture within which faith and religion were part of the very fabric of our lives and by and large the culture helped carry the faith. No matter what your denomination, everyone went to church on Sunday. Sunday shopping wasn’t part of the scene. You had to be pretty brave and bold not to go to Mass or Sunday service on a Sunday. I went through school with a kid named Gordon Henderson – he was different. First of all he called his parents by their first names – not done. In Lent were we all expected to give up candy and movies. Not Gordon. He never missed a Saturday at the Mayfair theatre on Waterloo Street. We all waited for him to be struck dead. He never was.
But in those days confession on Saturday, Mass on Sunday, fish on Friday, family rosary, daily Mass and fasting in Lent, these were things we just did. Everyone else was doing them too.
We all know things are quite different today. Have you ever seen a Catholic friend give you a strange look when they find out you go to Mass quite regularly? In the past it took a lot of guts to miss Mass on Sunday – it would be noticed. Today it takes a strong inner-anchored act of faith to come to Mass on a Sunday. God bless you for being here.
The truth of the matter is, all that moral support that sustained us in years past is gone. Our culture no longer carries the faith and the church and the teachings of the church, especially as regards the dignity and sanctity of life in all it stages. The days and the times are gone when we lived in a community where most believed, went to church and shared the same moral values. This is now true of Catholics and other Christian denominations. Without that community support there are times when we can feel like the ‘lonely little petunia in the onion patch.’ Maybe in those good old days we never gave much thought to what we did or why we did it. We just went with the flow. But there was a sense of security in that flow.
Rita MacNeil has a great song, “You’re flying on your own.” That’s pretty much where we are these days, as individuals and as a community. We have to rely on our own resources, our own sense of commitment.
Our resources are bolstered by our main resource – the Holy Spirit, whose feast we celebrate today. Without the Spirit the early church could never have survived. The first followers of Jesus were ostracized by their families and faith communities, they were seen as betrayers of their traditions, suspected of strange beliefs and weird rituals. Because of their faith in Jesus they had nothing in common with the values and morals of the times. They certainly were flying on their own, but the wind beneath their wings was the ‘gusting’ of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit gave them the courage and fortitude to profess and live their new found faith even to the point of death. The Spirit gave them the wisdom not to second guess their commitment to the Risen Christ. The Spirit gave them the understanding and counsel to discern how to live their Christian lives among people who could not comprehend their beliefs and way of life.
It is that same Spirit who offers us an inner strength and meaning that is rooted in something beyond what the world thinks and what the majority is doing. The Spirit will help us hold on to the conviction that right is right if no one is doing it, and wrong is wrong if everyone is doing it.
As Fr. Rolheiser says, “To be committed believers today – to have faith truly inform our lives requires finding an inner anchor beyond the support and security we find in being part of the believing majority wherein we have the comfort of knowing that, since everyone else is doing this, it probably makes sense. Many of us now live in situations where to believe in God and church is to find ourselves without support of the majority and at times without the support of those closest to us – family friends and collogues”. Can you relate to his observation? I can.
In our personal struggles to live our lives as Christians we need the support of one another. It is the Holy Spirit who binds us together, it is the Holy Spirit who gives us that attitude of gratitude which makes us grateful for all the gifts with which our lives are blessed, it is the Holy Spirit who brings us together today to praise and thank God for the blessings of our lives, it is the Holy Spirit who gives us the conviction and courage to live as fully as we can the life to which we are called even when we may feel we are flying on or own.
As we continue to celebrate this feast of the Holy Spirit we pray for ourselves and for each other that every day our lives we keep our minds and hearts open to the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit forms us into the likeness of Christ.
The Pastoral Mission Fund, funded by ShareLife, was established in 1982 to assist missionaries working at the grass roots level in developing nations with pastoral/evangelical programs. Funds are allocated to small – scale projects for the support of missionaries.
Because you give… Missionaries, Priests and Sisters in developing nations can:
2007 ShareLife Total: $164,652.60 2008 ShareLife to Date: $120,222.00
Congratulations to the young people of our parish who were confirmed last Sunday, May 4th by Fr. Paul Cusack, C.P.
Catherine Alulio Veronica Lei Julian Arellano Christina Leung Asif Baksh Arthur Li Ethan Ballos Julian Li Lashawna Barry-Green Sasha Maghami James Booker Laura Lee May Maria Brandes Nathan Moore Cathleen Calica Laura Munro Vivian Chan Joseph Ng April Cho Robin Ng Daniel Choi Hannah Noel Lucas Cryer Lindsey O’Neill Kathleen De Barra Morton Nguyen Madeline Della Mora Jessica Oakie Jackson Donnelly Christopher Piatek Nathan Donnelly Jessica Prieur Connor Flanagan Marc Stedman Geneva Frank Sonia Tam Lucas Furlan Arjun Tharumalingam Christina Galowitsch Alexander Tran Hannah Galway Simon Urbanc Jessica Goldson Laura Valderrama John Goncalves Joshua Vandittelli Scott Hall Alexander Videka Robert Iannuzziello Clare Wheeler Catherine Kim Hanson Wong Vanessa Laxton
It was a beautiful celebration marking an important moment in their journey of faith. We were proud to celebrate this important event with them. We promise them our continued prayers and support.
Total: $8,266.44
The ShareLife office will be accepting donations to support humanitarian relief efforts underway in Myanmar, assisting in the provision of food, shelter, clean water, and medical assistance. The Catholic Church’s official relief body, Caritas Internationalis, is coordinating the efforts for its 162 national members, working with staff in the region. As has been the case in the past, contributions will be channelled through the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development & Peace, the Caritas representative organization in Canada.
Those wishing to help may do so in the following ways:
Blessed Trinity’s annual Communion Breakfast will be held on Sunday, May 25TH in the church hall following the 9:00 AM Mass. The guest speaker is Michael McManus, National Catholic Broadcasting Council. The cost is $15. For tickets, please call Kathy Nelson at 905-886-7681 or Joyce Egberts at 416-221-9969
St Gabriel’s Parish will again be taking part in this year’s Doors Open Toronto on Sunday, May 25th from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
Fair Trade organic coffees will be on sale after all the Masses next weekend.
Regular ground coffee: $5 Decaffeinated: $6 Whole beans: $5 Chocolate Bars: $4 incl. taxes Hot Chocolate and Cocoa: $4.50
Our new activities kick off on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 with a day of golf for all parishioners at the glorious glen Eagle Golf Club. Individual players as well as foursomes are welcome and we have a great mix of both men and women players. The event is open to both casual and competitive golfers and is followed by a magnificent Dinner and Awards Banquet.
Dear Parishioners of St Gabriel’s,
Thank you once again for your generosity towards our families this past Christmastime. As you know, we continue to serve numerous families and feel honoured to provide them with your donations at Christmastime. As well, the food that you donate throughout the year enables us to maintain a small food bank here at the branch. This allows clients who are visiting the branch to pick up items in emergency situations and the social workers to assist our client children and parents when they are most in need.
Please accept this plaque (now in the display case) in appreciation of your generosity and our continued best wishes to each of you at St. Gabe’s. We really value the partnership between St. Gabriel’s Parish and the North Branch of this Society.
Founded by St. Paul of the Cross, every Passionist takes a special vow to spend his or her energies in promoting remembrance of the sufferings of Jesus, the memory of the Cross, and reflection of the meaning of the Cross for the world.
Learn about Passionists and our insignia »
Companion for the Walk of the Stations of the Cosmic Earth
St. Gabriel’s Garden – Guided Sensory Reflective Walk