Author: J. Thorp

Why Are We Here?

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Blogger’s Note: For those few of you who still follow this blog and don’t attend St. Michael Catholic Church, the article below was published in the Sunday, Sept. 14, church bulletin as part of a regular monthly faith formation column.

This weekend’s Fall Festival is a great opportunity to support our parish and grow in community. Surely it is a sign of life in our local Body of Christ that so many people spend this weekend here, year after year, in fellowship and service. The chairpeople and volunteers, the sponsors and donors, and everyone who works to make this weekend a success deserve our gratitude – so please remember them in your prayers!

It also important, however, that we remember why we do these things. This summer, a friend shared an article with me entitled “Vibrant Isn’t About Busy: Organizing Parish Life for Discipleship.” The article made the case that while an abundance of activities and programs might seem important for attracting people to the faith, quite often these programs are actually distracting from activities like prayer and the sacraments that promote spiritual growth. Parishioners can find themselves so caught up in the busy-ness of it all that they forget that these offerings are not an end in themselves. They only matter if they lead us closer to God and heaven.

With that in mind, you should notice a distinct shift in the emphasis and tone of our faith formation activities this year, beginning with LIFT-Off, our program kickoff event on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 6:30 p.m. In years past, LIFT-Off has been a combination of entertainment and logistics—something fun for the kids, along with information and scheduling details for the parents. This year, instead, we are opening LIFT-Off with Mass, followed by a brief personal witness or two about the power of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ to transform families. This is a great opportunity to spend a little extra time with Our Lord at the beginning of the academic year, and we’d like to invite everyone in the parish to join us and pray for the success of our faith formation and sacramental programs.

If you haven’t been to a weekday Mass recently, know that both the Mass and the witness should last only about an hour combined. Confirmation families will need to stay a bit longer to meet with Father and me about sacramental preparation; everyone else should be free by about 7:30 p.m. to pick up their LIFT materials and head home. Our goal is to give you an opportunity to spend some time with God giving thanks for His blessings and specifically praying about the needs of your family.

It’s not always easy to commit to family faith formation, weekly or daily Mass, or regular Confession—but we know that parents who make prayer and the sacraments a priority in their lives have children who do the same.  We also know that, with a heart open to God’s graces, what starts as an obligation can become a habit and then a joy. Please consider this year’s LIFT-Off to be a step toward a sacramental life and a renewed relationship with Jesus, and take great hope in His reassuring words to us from the Gospel of Matthew: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

‘Make Straight the Way of the Lord’

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Blogger’s Note: For those few of you who still follow this blog and don’t attend St. Michael Catholic Church, the article below was published in the Sunday, Aug. 24, church bulletin at our pastor’s request as a the first of a regular monthly faith formation column.

It’s been an eventful last few weeks. Early in the month, I survived my first-ever Vacation Bible School, a sort of faith formation director boot camp, helping to wrangle 175 children, age four through sixth grade. I want to thank Kathy Pope for all her work to plan and staff the week’s activities, and the countless adult and teen teachers who worked so hard to make VBS a success. God bless you!

Almost immediately, my family and I headed north to Camp Lebanon, where I was greeted by a throng of green-shirted, high-fiving VBSers who knew me by name (Mr. Thorp, in most cases) and expected me to know them, as well. The weekend was a whirlwind of typical camp activities – water sports and zip line; family meals and fellowship; evening rosaries, confession, and mass—mixed with conversations with a number of parishioners about what to expect from LIFT and other faith formation offerings in the coming years. I am grateful for the opportunity to hear how the parish can better help you and your families grow in faith, and these conversations reinforced a growing feeling I’ve had since beginning in this position: people in this community are hungry for a deeper relationship with Christ.

I left Camp Lebanon for two nights of solitude at the Franciscan retreat center Pacem In Terris, in the hermitage of St. Dominic—a simple, comfortable cabin looking out on a green patch of woods vibrant with the beauty of God’s creation. After more than a week of steady noise and activity, this silent retreat was a welcome opportunity to spend time alone with God and ask Him, With all of the good ideas and works we could undertake here at St. Michael, what would you have me do?

The answer came in the words of Isaiah and John the Baptist: “Make straight the way of the Lord.” Over and over again, the message rang in my heart: Let them come. Help them come.

To that end, although family catechesis will continue to be our model going forward and LIFT this year will be a culmination of what we started last year, we hope to emphasize the importance of relationship: between parents and children, between parishioners and their neighbors, and most importantly, between each of us and Jesus. We hope to be more flexible and do a better job of meeting you where you are and encouraging you and your families toward a deeper relationship with Christ—in prayer, in the sacraments, and in His body, the Church. We hope to find the right balance between the individual path each of us walks with the Lord and the fact that we are called to journey together in truth and charity. We can’t reach God alone—not only because we are fallen and in need of God’s grace, but also because God calls us to communion with him and with each other. 

People are hungry for God. Whether we realize it or not, the longing we feel for something more in this life is our desire for a personal relationship with our Lord and Creator—and it’s meant to be satisfied. I look forward to undertaking this journey with you, hungry but hopeful, toward heaven. See you this fall!

Book Break: God’s Doorkeepers

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Ordinarily when I do one of these mini-reviews, I try to summarize the book as I offer my reflections on it. In the case of Joel Schorn’s wonderful little book God’s Doorkeepers, which presents the parallel biographies of three 20th century saints (though only two have been canonized to date), I’ll let the summary on the back of the book explain the work for me:
I look on my whole life as giving, and I want to give and give until there is nothing left to give. – Solanus Casey
Padre Pio and Andre Bessette would have readily agreed with Solanus Casey even though, on the surface, none of the three had much to give. All grew up in humble circumstances, each suffered poor health, and none achieved academic distinction or prominent positions in their religious orders. They were, to all appearances, the sort of people others overlook.
Yet in their lifetimes, untold numbers found physical and interior healing through their ministries, and since their deaths their fame has grown enormously. Their secret was the secret of every successful Christian life: In complete humility, they abandoned themselves to the will of God.
Bessette and Casey literally answered the door at their monasteries, and Pio was something of a spiritual doorkeeper in the confessional. God’s Doorkeepers reveals how these miracle-workers, in spite of their lowly circumstances, inspired and continue to inspire those who seek a healing encounter with God.
By way of commentary, I’ll offer this observation: I am sometimes guilty of reading Scripture or accounts of the incredible accomplishments of the ancient saints and silently wondering, “Where is God today? Why does He not show his power and love today as he’s done in the past?” I admit that I sometimes long for a sign (a parted sea, the lame walking, the dead raised) and when I don’t witness these things…I don’t lose faith, per se, but I wonder…

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Book Break: The Relative Un-Importance of Being Earnest

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Jodi and I used to watch a lot of Seinfeld. In relatively small doses, the show struck us as amusing to flat-out hilarious, although occasionally there was an episode that made us cringe or second-guess our choice of entertainment.

When the series finale rolled around, we were there with much of the rest of the country to see how it all would end. The last joke, it turned out, was on us: using courtroom testimony as the vehicle, the final episode chronicled, back-to-back-to-back, what rotten, superficial human beings Jerry and the gang were during the run of the series, then ended with a joke about how they’d already had the final conversation before. Jodi and I looked at each other with the grim realization that we had wasted a tremendous amount of time over the previous several years, to no redeeming end.

Like Seinfeld, Oscar  Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest seems to me to be adamantly about nothing. Of course, like the TV show, the play has to be about something, but it sets the bar so low that it is essentially a three-act setup to a single joke, the punchline of which is a pun. Like a good sitcom episode, it is funny and short. (I read it in an evening.) I would like to say it’s witty, but I’m not sure it’s clever enough for that. It seems to me to be an exercise in style, primarily, with little substance beneath it.

Several years ago now, I read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. That is a great story, and proof enough  in my book that Wilde was a great writer. At the time, I wrote, “It’s a great story full of people you can’t stand, living in a world of false beauty. … Part of the genius of this book is the sinking feeling that there really are people like these, and we may even know some of them.” That line holds true for Earnest, except the word “great” and the phrase “of the genius.” While I don’t regret reading it (especially given its brevity), I sincerely wish there would have been more to it.

A New Calling

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Blogger’s Note: For those few of you who still follow this blog and don’t attend St. Michael Catholic Church, the article below was published at our pastor’s request as a self-introduction to the community in last weekend’s parish bulletin.

As of this week, I have been your new faith formation director for one month. The transition feels fresher than that, and I feel just as green, in many ways, as on the first day in the office. As I’ve said more than once, it’s like I’m a first-time parent again: like I have been entrusted with something precious and fragile and sent home with lots of advice and no clear idea of what to expect next.

Okay, it’s not as bad as all that. My wife Jodi and I have been parishioners here for 11 years now; two of our children (Trevor and Lily) have been born and baptized here, and our older kids (Brendan, Gabe, and Emma) have been altar servers and active in the youth group and other activities. Jodi and I were youth leaders at our previous parish—St. Michael’s in Remus, Michigan—and have been LIFT catechists, liturgical ministers, Natural Family Planning and God’s Plan For a Joy-Filled Marriage witnesses, and CRHP witnesses here. I also served on the Faith Formation Advisory Committee during the transition to LIFT, so I understand what we’re trying to accomplish and know how hard Carol and Kathy have worked over the years to build our core program.

Nevertheless, this is a big shift for me. I was baptized in the Faith but not raised in it, and I became a husband and father before I became a confirmed and practicing Catholic. Until last month, I had spent my entire professional career in journalism and communications. Jodi and I have talked for several years about the possibility of me working for the Church someday, but never imagined the call would come this soon. And it is a call. This past Monday’s reading from the prophet Hosea described the Lord leading His people to a desert place and speaking to their heart—and professionally, this past year was desolate and lonely, until former colleagues, friends, and family all began to urge me to pray and to think about what I was being called to do.

I prayed. I did my best to listen. And I’m here…now what?

We visited some of our former youth group “kids” in Michigan earlier this month, one of whom was recently featured in the Diocese of Grand Rapids magazine for her beautiful pro-life witness. In the article, Natalie jokes about how much she could accomplish if God would just give her a clear to-do list. Instead she—and we—are called into a relationship and an ongoing conversation with God, in which we get to know Him day by day, enabling us to better hear, understand, and respond to His desires for us.

That’s where I find myself now. We have a beautiful parish and community, faith-filled priests, strong core programs, devout and dedicated catechists, and a rookie faith-formation director who is on the job, but still praying and listening. We have a firm foundation and so much potential—and I look forward to hearing from and working with you as we continue to become a people living for Christ.