Announcements
THE MEN'S GROUP
The Men’s Group program is a treatment program for adult males who abuse their partners. Weekly therapy sessions are conducted by professional therapists. Clients are empowered with life-changing skills that will help them to live a productive and violence-free life.
The Office of Family Life wishes to encourage all men who may be experiencing a challenge to kindly contact our Office for further information.
Telephone contacts: 322-8919 or 328-4310/2
Church Ministries
REFLECTIONS
"Waiting for Christ"
Each new year, as it passes, brings us the same warnings again and again, and none perhaps more impressive than those with which it comes to us at this season .... The year is worn out. Spring, summer, autumn, each in turn, have brought their gifts and done their utmost, but they are over, and the end is come .... Thus the soul is cast forward upon the future, and in proportion as its conscience is clear and its perception true does it rejoice solemnly that the night is advanced, the day is at hand, that there are a new heaven and a new earth (Rv 21:1) to come, though the former are failing. Nay, rather, because they are failing, it will soon see the king in his beauty and behold a land that stretches afar (Is 33:17).
These are feelings for [those] waiting ... calmly though earnestly, for the advent of Christ. And such, too, are the feelings with which we now come before him in prayer day by day. The season is chill and dark, and the breath of the morning is damp, but all this befits those who are by profession penitents and mourners, watchers and pilgrims .... True faith does not covet comforts. It only complains when it is forbidden to kneel, when it reclines upon cushions .... Its only hardship is to be hindered, or to be ridiculed, when it would place itself as a sinner before its judge ....
One year goes and then another, but the same warnings recur. The frost or rain comes again; the earth is stripped of its brightness; there is nothing to rejoice in. And then, amid this unprofitableness of earth and sky, the well-known words return: the prophet Isaiah is read, the same epistle and Gospel bidding us to awake from sleep and welcome him who comes in the name of the Lord, the same prayers, beseeching him to prepare us for judgment. O blessed are they who obey these warning voices, and look out for him whom they have not seen, because they have loved his appearing (2 Tm 4:8) ....
At present, we are in a world of shadows .... Suddenly it will be rent in twain and vanish away, and our Maker will appear. He will look on us, while we look on him..
SAINT JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
Saint John Henry Newman (┼1890) was a convert to the Catholic faith and a preacher of great eloquence. He was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.