St. Joseph the Worker

Dear Parishioners of St. Joseph the Worker:

This weekend we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, which occurs annually the weekend after Pentecost.  This celebrates one of the biggest, deepest, and unexplainable mysteries of our Catholic faith.  How could our God be One Nature, yet Three Persons?  It doesn’t make sense, does it?  No, it doesn’t to our limited minds.  And that is where mystery and faith intersect, if you will.

This mystery requires faith, plain and simple.  And faith is believing without seeing.  Faith is believing without something making sense.  Faith is that great gift given to us by God to “cope” with the mysteries in our Catholic Church.  Faith leads us to see that we don’t know everything, nor can we or should we.  We are not divine as God is.  We are mere humans, limited in our capacity to think and reason.  God has no limits. 

In other words, when it comes to a mystery such as the Holy Trinity, we need to believe it.  Period.  The “how can this be?” part of the equation is not ours to worry about.  That is for God to worry about the “how this can be.”  Our job, as followers of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is to believe in the “that” – that our loving God in heaven is One Nature, Three Persons.  We don’t need to understand everything about our faith.  We don’t need to be able to explain every dogma or belief.  Our job is not necessarily to explain it, but to believe it.

How is our faith this week?   Is it strong enough to believe in the mystery of the Holy Trinity?  Let us pray that our faith is deep and solid enough to lead us to a deep and solid belief in what cannot be explained.  May the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity not test our faith, but help us to appreciate its presence in our lives more and more each day.

Your Pastor,

Father Joe

P.S.  I will be away this weekend at my annual Miniature Liquor Bottle Show in St. Louis.  I will be looking for more “bottle treasures!!!”  This weekend we welcome Fr. Honoratus, a priest of the Diocese of Butare in Rwanda.  He will be here at all the Masses for the annual Missionary Co-Op Program.  Please be generous in responding to Father’s appeal for his diocese.

AND, this Sunday we have the annual Fr. Franzen Golf Outing.  Thanks to Dave Kennedy & Crew for all the work & preparation for this event.  May all the golf shots be right down the middle!!