#newsletter;#Chrisitinaity;#youth
Post Office Box 642656
San Francisco, CA 94164
415-305-2124
Fr. River Sims, D.Min., D.S.T.
Director
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Summertime: A Time of Creation and Rest!
——————————————————————–
in the new light
of each day’s questions.
I am never prepared
Today, again, I have nothing
to offer but a handful
of old prayers, worn down
by the relentless abasion
of doubt and a fragment
of dream, that plays on in my head
only half-remembered. Still,
the doves coo and circle
through the pines
as they do when I pass
each morning. Their
sorrow is so nearly human, it rings
sweet with regret. By dusk,
the trees will bow down, and I too, will
make my appeal will
find again your mercy,
your solace.
(Elizabeth Drescher)
(How will we embrace Wisdom’s life and love these days?
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After Pentecost, we enter a season with no common focus called “Ordinary Time!” These weeks hold both the slower pace and peaceful quality of summer months and the quicker pace and flurry of activity in early fall.
These are the “ordinary” days in which we live out our daily lives.
It is time we settle into the growing season, nourishing the seeds planted in the Spring and putting down roots in our lives.
This is my 30th season of “Ordinary Time” in San Francisco and the words of Drescher I hear loud and clear in the dusk of my ministry::
By dusk,
the trees will bow down, and I too, will
make my appeal will
find again your mercy,
your solace.
What I have learned in these 30 years is that like the Apostle Peter, I am simply weak, and a sinner dependent on the mercy of God every day.
Pope Francis sums up the core of ministry, and of our daily lives in these words:
“What a good teacher our Lord is! The prophetic gesture of Jesus points to the prophetic Church that, washed of her sin, is unafraid to go out to serve a wounded humanity. Peter experienced in his flesh the wound of sin, but also of his own limitations and weaknesses. Yet he learned from Jesus that his wounds could be a path of resurrection. To know both Peter disheartened
and Peter transfigured is an invitation to pass from being a Church of the unhappy and disheartened that serves all those people who are unhappy and disheartened in our midst. A Church capable of serving her Lord in those who are hungry, imprisoned, thirsting, homeless, naked and informed. .(Mt. 25:35. A service that has nothing to do with a welfare ministry or an attitude of paternalism but rather with the CONVERSION OF THE HEARTS. The problem is not feeding the poor or clothing the naked or visiting the sick, but rather RECOGNIZING THAT THE POOR, THE NAKED, PRISONERS AND THE HOMELESS HAVE THE DIGNITY TO SIT AT OUR TABLE, TO FEEL “AT HOME” AMONG US, TO FEEL PART OF A FAMILY. This is the sign that the Kingdom of Heaven is in our midst. This is the sign of a Church wounded by sin, shown mercy by the Lord, and made prophetic by his call.”
The greatest gift God has given me in these years is to lean on the mercy of God. All around us, the “throw-away” culture has no mercy; all values are relative to the logic of technology. It is easy for us to trust in power and law, rather than in the power of God’s mercy.
In all these years, God’s mercy has been sustaining, leading me through life’s difficulties.
I invite each of you to stand in the shoes of mercy and show mercy to others, knowing that you experience mercy in the hands of God. I “try” to invite everyone to have mercy knowing that by:
By dusk,
the trees will bow down, and I too, will
make my appeal, will
find again your mercy,
your solace!
30th Anniversary Celebration
Victor’s Pizza
6 p.m.
November, 2024
WE ARE BEGGARS! WE REALLY NEED MONEY1
FOR FOOD, SOCKS, HARM REDUCTION AND OTHER SERVICES!
P.O. Box 642656
415-305-2124
pay pal
Temenos Catholic Worker
P.O. Box 642656
San Francisco, CA 94164
Fr. River Sims, D.Min, D.S.T.
TEMENOS CATHOLIC WORKER 
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