Bulletin Reflection - St Jude Catholic Church - Pearl Mississippi - 5 April 2020

      We are now about to enter Holy Week with Palm Sunday and the Triduum of liturgies soon approaching.  As Catholics, Holy Week is the highlight of our year.  However, this year, with the stay-at-home order in place and with public gatherings suspended, we are going to have a very different Holy Week.  We will issue a schedule of our liturgies for Holy Week.  We hope that all of you will join us.  

        I have taken this time of self-isolation and social distancing to try to read more and to grow in my faith through reading, even in the midst of all I am trying to do in our parish and in the Diocese.  I hope that all of you are taking the time for daily prayers, spiritual reading, and Scripture reading in your daily lives.  We need this in our life more than ever.  Different prayers and quotes have been a great inspiration to me during this time.  Bishop Kopacz has mentioned to me how much the serenity prayer has meant to him during this time of difficulty and struggle that we are going through.  The serenity prayer was originally written by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971).  Niebuhr was raised in the German Evangelical and Reformed Church. This has special meaning to me, as I was baptized into the Evangelical and Reformed Church myself in Chicago and grew up in that church and in the United Methodist Church as a child and a youth.  The serenity prayer has taken on many forms and many versions, both short and long.  It has become most famous as being a part of Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-step programs. Below is one version of the serenity prayer from 1951.  May it communicate to you God’s grace and encouragement:   

God, give me grace to accept with serenity

the things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things

which should be changed,

and the Wisdom to distinguish

the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking, as Jesus did,

This sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it,

Trusting that You will make all things right,

If I surrender to Your will,

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,

And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.