18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dear Friends,

It’s August already! I don’t know about you, but this has been one of the fastest summers I can remember. The kids will be starting their studies at the Academy on Tuesday. We’ll begin to roll out our different ministry offerings in about another month. We are more than half of the way through 2024! Things are moving quickly. Yet, with the repetition of the seasons, though things change, they also remain the same in many ways.

In the liturgy this weekend, we go for round two of five in the Bread of Life Discourse from the Sixth Chapter of the Gospel of John. We hear Jesus say at the end, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Beautiful and amazing words. In that sentence, Jesus tells us the true remedy for all of our emptiness, brokenness, questions, doubts, confusions. He tells us that he is enough! It is he who sustains us year after year, change after change. He is unchanging. He always satisfies.

The real question for us this week is: Do I believe this? In the midst of life’s constant fluctuations, the different moments of grief, beginnings and endings of various experiences, deaths and births – do I go to the Lord for what I need? Do I trust that he really can be enough? Not that life won’t be hard, but that we can be confident in maintaining a certain peace? A big part of this, I believe, is not overlooking the awesome fact that God left a tangible reality of his presence in the Most Holy Eucharist. In the tabernacle of every Catholic church, Jesus waits with that invitation: “Come.” Let’s heed his invitation and literally come to him in prayer, planting ourselves with regularity before the tabernacle, and ask him to satisfy our needs.

-Fr. Kennell