FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK

Dear St. Mary’s Parishioners,

What is your life built on? It’s a fantastic question to reflect upon. Another way of looking at this philosophical mountain is asking ourselves, what do you hold most dear? It’s often the thing in your life that you spend the most time on. Time and what we value tend to correlate with one another. For example, the famed NBA basketball player Kobe Bryant, was renowned for his relentless work ethic. In a television interview, he explained his approach:

If your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be you have to practice, you have to train. You wanna train as much as you can as often as you can. So, if you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 12. Train for 2 hours, 12-2pm, you have to let your body recover. You get back out, you train. You start training at 6pm, train from 6-8pm and now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up and you do it again.

Those are two sessions. Now imagine, you wake up at 3am and you train at 4am, go 4-6am, come home breakfast, relax. Now you're back at it again, 9- 11am, you relax and now all of a sudden, you're back at it again, 2-4pm. Now you back at it again, 7-9pm. Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4am. So now you do that as the years go on the separation that you have with your competitors and your peers, just grows larger and larger and larger and larger and larger.

Kobe valued winning a championship. His life reflected that. We must admire him for it. Jesus in this Sunday gospel goes to the heart of what we tend to value in this world and smashes it in the face. Our Lord shockingly says, “All that you see here (referring to the “costly stones” that adorned the Holy Temple in Jerusalem) – the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down." (Cf. Luke 21:5) Then he predicts what will happen to those of us who decide to value our faith above all else. He warns, “they will seize and persecute you… You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name…” (Cf. Luke 21:16-18) This sounds radical to many. Yet for those who value and build their lives upon the love of Christ and fidelity to his Church, how can we choose anything else, if not him?

A Slave of Jesus Christ,

Fr. Brian J. Solive