Happy first year parish anniversary!
Time flies so quickly. It feels like it was just yesterday when we decided to leave our securities behind and chose to overcome our anxiety as to where this journey takes us. We took courage to come together and, launching our waka into the deep, we trusted God to lead us towards the shores of our hopes and aspirations.
After a year, we have certainly come a long way. There were times of confusion as if the wind was blowing from every direction. There were moments when we felt like the wind had died and we were drifting to nowhere. But we are also certain of those graced moments when we became familiar with the position of the stars in the night sky, and so we have become more creative and discerning as a community.
Hence, this celebration brings us to the mountaintop, the same feeling Peter felt with the transfiguration of Jesus before his eyes in the Gospel passage today. We are gradually “transfigured” into the community we envisioned. And like Peter, we gratefully exclaim, “Lord, how good it is for us to be here.”
It is indeed good to celebrate this milestone, to thank God, and to reflect and gain new insights that would help us process, understand, and bring to light our experiences. These bring the gift of discovery, encourage our growth, and generate valuable insights to our journey. These enhance the meaning of our community.
When we “take our dancing shoes off” and return to normality, we take all the consolations with us. These will sustain us in rough times, in times of monotony, or even in times of desolation. As William Barclay says, “We cannot live forever on the mountain, but we cannot live at all without it”.
Nga mihi nui i te Karaiti,
Fr. Dennis Nacorda
Our First Anniversary Mass
