Dear friends,
Happy Easter! Christ Is Risen! Alleluia, alleluia!
I would like to welcome all our new parishioners, guests, visitors, and all of us here at Holy Cross. I assure that you and your loved ones are all deeply held in my heart and lifted up in prayers to God as we offer these sacred mysteries of our salvation and renewal.
Throughout these past forty days, we reflected alongside and with our Lord Jesus on the implications of discipleship. As a community of disciples, we learn from the Master who leads us on the journey of personal relationship with him; a journey meant to grow. I would like to congratulate all of us for the perseverance we demonstrated in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, learning from his merciful heart.
Today we celebrate Easter, the Resurrection of the Lord. While we remain speechless and in awe at the manifestation of the power of our Lord over death and darkness, we are also reminded that Easter is the beginning of our discipleship journey. Let us remember the message the Lord gave to Mary Magdalene: “Go and tell my brothers that I am alive and I am preceding them to Galilee.” Two verbs of action are fundamental here: Go and Tell.
To celebrate Easter is therefore a call for us to embrace the journey of discipleship. As we strive to build a church of living stones, we commit to following our discipleship path here at Holy Cross. A community of disciples is a risen and fearless community. Enlightened by the light of the Lord’s resurrection and bearing in our minds and hearts the core message of commission to Mary Magdalene, we resolve to become the STARS in a growth-focused community.
STARS is the acronym for our discipleship path here at Holy Cross. It means that as disciples we are called to Serve God and our neighbors, to Transform hearts through encounters with God, to Accept our uniqueness and differences as a bilingual community as opportunity for growth, to Reach out to those out of our church doors, and to Share our faith, talents, and treasures for the building up of the better world.
Let us therefore embrace the message the Lord gives to Mary Magdalene, making it our own, to engage on this path of discipleship with courage and determination as we become an Easter community, meant to share the wonders of God’s love for humanity.
And let us continue to pray for one another and for our parish family.
Fr. Emery