Twilight Twitches

Dear Family,
Who is under the mask? I keep wondering. It’s pretty embarrassing when you are three minutes into a conversation, and you really don’t know to whom you are speaking. T. J. Sharpe and I may be the only ones immediately recognizable. We do have elegantly shaped heads.

That thought may seem a strange way to begin a Twitch on the Feast of the Ascension (i.e. Seventh Sunday of Easter). Basically, what we celebrate on this feast is an idea that emerges from the gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us in one way or another that Jesus returned to his Father. In John, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “Do not hold on to me for I have not yet ascended to my father.”

Dear Family,
It’s rare that I am at a loss for words. It’s not that I don’t have words; I have too many. It is because so many thoughts are crowding my head and my heart on this Mother’s Day.

Last Tuesday was Mom and Dad’s 81st anniversary, which is comforting since I’m nearly eighty. The math works out okay.

Tomorrow, the 10th, would be Dad’s 106th birthday. On May 17th, baby sister Cathy celebrates her __th, (I’m not telling,) my anniversary is on the 25th, so May is a great month for our family.

Dear Family,
This week’s gospel is challenging me to ask myself, “To what am I attached?” I’ve begun writing this early in the week and I’m pretty sure as the days pass by, my working list of attachments is going to get longer, I suspect longer than I would have thought.

I’m not making attachments a bad word. It seems to me that some attachments could be very good. We call those things virtues. Virtues are good habits and if I’m attached to a good habit, I’m grateful to the Lord.

The bad aspect is that I can become so attached to some things that I don’t even realize that they distract me from the call that every Christian re-ceives: to be, first and foremost, attached to the Lord.

Dear Family,
Happy Eastertime. Lent was forty days of preparation and now Eastertime is fifty days of celebration. We celebrate the core of our faith, the Resurrection of Jesus. In I Cor 15:17, St. Paul tells us “... if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain...” We all know that. So, what’s new? What is new, is really what is old... God’s love.

Can you ever expect to understand what the idea of a loving God really means? I can’t. What I do know is that the person of Jesus is the fullest statement about His love that God can make. As I mentioned previously, the Creed of Father Fuellenbach got kicked up a notch, and we hear God saying:

I love you unconditionally.

I forgive you completely.

I will never leave you alone.