Thanks Be To God
This morning at our Thanksgiving Day mass I celebrated the Eucharist for the last time with the prayers of our current missal. On this day when we pause to give thanks, I am thankful for these prayers that have served my entire life as a roadmap to God. These are the prayers that formed me as a child, they are the prayers that guided me as I prepared for the sacraments of Confirmation and Eucharist, they are the prayers the slowly penetrated my heart as I was discerning a vocation to priesthood and they are the prayers that have sustained and nourished me in ministry. I will miss them.
Today I am also thankful for the new prayers that the Church has given to us and I look forward to praying them for the first time this Sunday. These new prayers have already been a blessing to me as I have studied them and worked with our parishioners in preparing for the changes in our liturgy. They have allowed me to slow down, to read the prayers with an eye for the theology that undergirds them, to look for the many connections to the Bible found within them and to begin looking for the reasons why we pray particular words for particular days. I imagine that this coming year will be similar to my first year as a newly ordained priest in that I will need to slow the pace and pay more attention to detail. If that is indeed the case, what a blessing that will be!
New beginnings are alway a challenge, but I have found more often than not that they are also very exciting. Let us give thanks to God for his continued invitation to new beginnings.
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