This Saturday at our 5 p.m. Mass Bishop Daniel Flores will confirm 97 of our teenagers and 3 adults. The sacrament of confirmation affirms, both on the part of the Church and on the part of the candidate, a maturity in Christ. It is akin to a personal Pentecost event, an experience of missioning.

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As human beings, we need many things: not only food for the stomach, but food for the mind and heart – the work of God the Father and Creator; the mission of His Son as the Word overcoming ignorance; and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete – which means Comforter - to guide us and to cure our hearts.

May all who receive the strength of this sacrament grow in Christ’s love and be courageous in professing the true faith!

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LORD, FILL ME WITH YOUR SPIRIT OF WISDOM to learn from my mistakes, to grow in self-confidence and still be open to your Word UNDERSTANDING to see all things in the light of your love RIGHT JUDGMENT COUNSEL to choose good friends and know how to be one

COURAGE to be unafraid of growing and becoming the best I can

KNOWLEDGE to be open to the truth and willing to search for it

REVERENCE to express my love and need of you in my daily thoughts

WOUNDER AND AWE FEAR OF THE LORD to keep alive your awesome, gentle presence in my life. “Of all the commendations on the Scriptures’, wrote the British author/minister John Donne, good example is the best.”

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Don’t just stand there pointing your finger to the heights you want your children to scale. Start climbing and they will follow!

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If God is never spoken of in the home as a person with whom the parents have a real personal relationship, the teenager assumes that, even for the parents, the 45 minutes on Sunday is at worst phony and at best deadened formalism.

Perhaps the parent does pray daily; perhaps he or she does have a true relationship with God. But I wonder in how many homes a parent ever talks about it. Parents talk plentifully of their business and social relationships, but in my experience they rarely speak of their diving relationship. How many parents ever tell their children how they came to meet the living God? Unless that happens, religion for the teenager remains something unreal, to be endured a few classes a week and once on Sunday, until he or she leaves home.
 

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