Door-to-Door Evangelization

While the official parish mission has not yet begun, the evangelization of the neighborhood has. On the Feast of the Annunciation, Fr. Joseph, Katy (my coworker), Marie-Alix (Emmanuel Community member), and myself took to the road, located a street with lots of houses, and began knocking on doors.
Before I continue, I know what most are you are thinking: "There is no way I could do that." Well, I bet all of you could. It just takes courage, zeal for souls, the willingness to be rejected, and trust in the Holy Spirit. And a partner to pray while you're talking. That's all. And once you do throw yourselves out there, the Lord repays in spades with joy. That's coming from the girl who considered door-to-door evangelization to be her least favorite form of evangelizing prior to coming to MN. Now, after almost two weeks of being out there and thinking of the people we've met, I'm all for it. There's nothing like the mission high.
Anyway, back to our first day. We arranged for the two pairs, Fr. Joseph with me and Katy with Marie-Alix, to take every other house on the block. However, Fr. Joseph and I got invited into the first house where someone was home and proceeded to have a 45 minute conversation with the man who lived there, while the girls were stuck canvassing the rest of the block in the cold. They were icicles by the time we met up with them again.
This encounter on the first day was great. Paulino is the man who let us in and he could use some prayer. He is Catholic who no longer goes to Mass but might go to a non-Catholic church. He is here from Mexico, trying to provide a better life for his four kids, two of whom are in Mexico. There are family and relationship struggles. We let him tell us about his life and in the end he invited us back to meet the rest of the family and to have a homecooked Mexican meal. Since then, we've stopped by his place once, with a delivery of banana bread, but he wasn't home. We'll keep visiting until we make contact again.
Since that day, we have met all sorts of people. A woman Episcopalian minister. A lesbian Buddhist-raised philosopher who thinks religion is good without believing in God. A homeless man who loves the Lord and is improving himself so he can win his ex-wife back and be a good father to his daughter. A Catholic woman who lives only 2 blocks from the parish but was going to another parish because she didn't know our mass times. By the way, we gave her a flyer and saw her that very night at the Spanish mass. One hopeful contact was with a college student named Whitney who was raised Lutheran or Episcopalian but hasn't been involved in a faith community for awhile. Fr. Joseph and I stopped by her place and in the course of the conversation she said two things that stick out in my mind, "I've been thinking of going to church for awhile now" and "Maybe this [meaning our invite to the Triduum liturgies and a possible young adult group at St. Stephen's (my after-Triduum project)] is just what I needed." Praise God!
Well, I should say goodbye for now. The official mission begins in two days so I entrust it, as always, to your prayers. Like St. Therese, who is the patroness of missionaries even though she never left her convent, you can join us in the mission with your prayers and sacrifices. In a future post I'll run through how we go about evangelizing door-to-door, what we say, prayer, etc. Amy Welbourn, an Augustine Institute graduate, has a great program for this, which I have yet to take. Check her out if you're in the Denver area.
Peace!

THE MISSION IS COMING...

3 Weeks until Easter

The planning continues. After the initial influx of planning meetings, things have settled a bit, people know their responsibilities, and meetings are progressing at a quicker pace. Amen, thanks be to God for that!
Every 10 days or so the mission planning team meets to discuss how the prep work is going. We now have a mission schedule, which includes two hours of evangelization every day, time for silent and group prayer, homeless outreach, a one-day youth retreat, a Living Stations of the Cross through the neighborhood, adoration in the Garden with Jesus Thursday night, and a rocking praise session after the Vigil. What a time it will be. I anxiously await the Triduum because I want to see how it will all turn out.
Well, it's time to head home after a good evening of planning the Stations and practicing Triduum music so I must go. Soon I will post some pictures. That way you have something fun to look at instead of all this typing.
Pray for us! As well as everything is progressing, the team is very aware of how the devil is trying to discourage us. The ESM reunion that I wrote about last time, I think, has been cancelled so we are looking for a few good external missionaries to sign up at the last minute. Host families and food provided...

Misc. News from the Past 3 Weeks

Sorry for my absence. So much for updating every weekend. Before I get started summarizing the highlights and funny moments of the past 2-3 weeks, two things. First, if anyone would like to discover more about the Emmanuel Community or its particular style of mission, coming up for the mission would be a great way to see the Community graces in action. All are welcome. Second, while the mission will be held during the Triduum, I’m actually ducking out of Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday to fly back to Denver to see my friend Beth enter the Catholic Church on Easter morning. I plan to stay in town for 3-4 days after Easter to visit everyone, go hiking, and hopefully use up the last 2 tickets on my four pack to Copper Mtn. If any of this interests you or you will be town during that time, we should try to get together.
Now to MN life. I went on a Frassati Society trip to Itasca State Park, which is where the Mississippi River officially begins. It’s the headwaters. We faced temps in the teens during the day and who knows how cold at night. I stayed indoors. I got to walk across a frozen lake and climb into a snow house for the first time. I went snowshoeing with a small group and we laughed and laughed at the experience. One girl had shoes that could have been used by the French fur trappers 200 years ago and that provided lots of enjoyment, especially as we went off trail and climbed up a hill. It’s not easy to do if you don’t have crampons on the bottom of your shoes. After this trip, I now know how to play 500, the card game, so I’m ready to join the Mid-Westerners when I return to Denver.
The weekend after the Itasca trip, the School of St. Paul went on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We only spent the day there, but we did manage to have Mass in the beautiful chapel (the architecture is a blend of Mexican and Roman styles and the side altars are dedicated to modern saints like Gianna, Maria Goretti, and Faustina) and pray the outdoor Stations of the Cross. The lunch in the bus displayed fraternal charity as people shared their chips, drinks, and tortas. On the ride home, we mixed up the people so they had to interview and introduce someone who wasn’t sitting beside them. It afforded many laughs as we overcame the language barrier to interview and share our new found information.
Since the start of Lent, the mission is ever before the mission team in our thinking. The mission is incorporated into our celebration of the Triduum and as of yesterday, we have four weeks until Easter. That makes most of the mission team anxious about our lack of time, but I’m relatively calm. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it works for me. Right now we are trying to nail down a mission schedule and people have begun work on the individual services they volunteered to take. It is amazing how much preparation has to go into having good Triduum liturgies, let alone when you add times of evangelization, sharing, and homeless outreach. I sure am learning a lot as I go.
There have been some fun/ridiculous experiences related to living in MN since I last wrote. One cool thing before I start in on the joys of having a car during the MN winter, I went to dinner with a friend at a funky place called the Chatterbox. It’s decorated with furniture from the 70’s, including ugly upholstered couches. The best thing about the restaurant, though, was that you can order board games and video games to play while you are there. We played Battleship (1-1 record) and Super Mario Bros. on the original Nintendo system. It is a unique place, definitely worth checking out.
Now to the snow. We had a major snow day a few weeks ago. It was the first time I saw people getting stuck on snow while driving and needing others’ help to push them out. I experienced this first hand when I parked on the street to go to Mass the morning after the snow. I was so pleased with where I parked because the snow was less than in other places so I thought I wouldn’t get stuck. I probably wouldn’t have until the snowplow drove by and shoved a bunch of snow under and around my car. To make matters worse, when I walked out of the church, I saw men in traffic vests beside my car as they were giving me a ticket for parking in the snowplow route. Get this: there are no signs on the side of the road I parked on saying it was a day plow route. The only way you know is that the other side has signs that say “night plow” so my side was day plow. What a scam to get money from parking tickets! Still, as I ran towards the guys and said, “Oh no, is that a parking ticket?,” I was friendly and laughing at the stupidity of it all so they helped dig me out. With my Cali plates, they could tell I wasn’t from around there so they also gave me advice on how to drive on snow or how to get moving when the tires spin. They didn’t take away the ticket though. Sadness.
Other crazy snow stories. I stopped in on Dr. Reyes’ undergraduate class one morning and on my way there, the sun was out with no sign of snow in the sky. Then one hour after his class as I used a computer in the library, the sky opened up and dumped tons of snow. I was so unprepared. No hat, thin gloves, no hood because I had taken it off that morning thinking I wouldn’t need it for awhile. The five block walk to my car was not fun. I discovered just how slippery snow on top of sidewalk ice can be.
Lastly, a few days ago we had snow and freezing rain. Snow I can handle; freezing rain is less nice. Three of us girls walked to my car after a night mission planning meeting and when we went to open the doors, they wouldn’t open. They had frozen shut. All I could think about was my coworker’s story of someone breaking her car door handle off as she tried to pull a frozen door open. I started working my keys in the gaps to try to dislodge any ice, but it was only Fr. Joseph’s experienced touch that got the door to open. It was unseasonably cold this past week so this type of experience is not common for March, but it begs the question, “Why do people live here?” There have been a lot of first experiences out here related to the weather and I laugh at the novelty, but I don’t know that I would want to do this year in and year out. God bless the hearty northern Mid-Westerners!

Ash Wednesday at St. Stephen's

Yes, Lent has begun! For a season in the Church that involves fasting and almsgiving and is typically seen as a somber time, I am so joyful at the prospect of cleaning out some spiritual junk and deepening my life with the Lord. Not only that, but this time is an exciting period for St. Stephen's because the Triduum retreat and parish mission fall at the end of it. So even though Lent has just begun, my eyes are on the finish line, the amazingly beautiful liturgies and times of evangelization that will happen from Holy Thursday to Easter. Praise God!

The joy that I have was enflamed yesterday at the bilingual Ash Wednesday Mass that was celebrated at St. Stephen's. The first joy came from the choir, which blossomed from Katy and I, with our voices and my lowly guitar, to an additional pianist, flutist, and singer. Man, the piano and flute are amazing instruments. They are really helpful to sing songs that we don't know, which is often the case with our humble choir. Slowly, but surely, the group is growing. The second joy was singing Latin mass parts. If you read a recent column about the parish in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, you will see what a big step this is for the parish. A link to the column is: http://www.startribune.com/local/39596282.html?elr=KArksUUUU. It's not a great article, poorly written at times, but it gives you an idea of what Fr. Joseph was facing when he arrived here a little less than a year ago. So, while we won't be singing Latin parts for most masses, we've decided to try it for bilingual masses because Latin is the universal language of the Church and doesn't favor either language group. The third joy came from seeing both communities together, worshipping together. The English mass on Sunday has only 30-40 people attending (that's a guess, I haven't yet counted) so to see a fuller church was nice and intimidating from the musical end. Overall, it was a beautiful night and I felt downright celebratory afterwards. Good things are happening!

I entrust to your prayers a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin this Saturday. We are taking the students from the School of St. Paul and a few others for an all-day trip. We have long bus rides and not a lot of time at the shrine so my prayer is that people will receive whatever they need from the trip but especially an increased sense of community between the two language groups. It's already developing. I just want it to continue to grow. That language barrier is the main difficulty.

The Social Side of Adjusting to the Twin Cities

God is so good. For most of us this is obvious, but the reason I bring it up has to do with thanking him for the ability to adjust quickly to new people and places. See, St. Paul is the sixth city I've lived in since I graduated college four and a half years ago and only two and a half weeks into the move, I am content with where I am at in life. Every weekend I have had plenty of fun things to do. Between Anne Braum, my coworker Katy, the Cathedral Young Adults, the Frassati Society, and my Emmanuel Community brothers and sisters, I have plenty of people to grow in friendship and brotherhood with and to do things with. I have two great roommates, Jessie who was my roomie for WYD and Lena the talkative cat. The ministry involves a variety of work and it's just so nice to devote my day to ministry again. I didn't realize how much I missed it until I thought about it on my drive to MN. But, just because I'm having a great time doesn't mean I'm planning a permanent move. I still love Denver. It's just good to be happy with where God calls you to be.

Just to give you an idea of the fun things that have happened out here to help the adjustment... Every week I join the four other Emmanuel community members for a night of faithsharing, what we call "household." We usually have dinner, praise, share on the Scriptures and life, and laugh a lot. They are a great group of people and I feel so blessed to be near community members again. There is Fr. Joseph, the only EC priest in the U.S., Anne and Thibaut Solage, who moved here from France five months ago for work, and Marie-Alix, who just finished the Emmanuel School of Mission and is teaching French at a local Catholic college for a year. Two weekends ago, for our monthly community day, we went tubing with the Solage's four kids and then devoted the afternoon and evening to fellowship and mission brainstorming. The day after, with Marie-Alix and her friend, I went ice skating on a frozen pond. That is still exciting for a Cali girl who loves to skate. This Saturday I joined the Solages and their children, Malilde, Gabriel, Jade, and Gregorie, for a day on the ski slopes and a night spent at their house. What a generous family! Then after Mass yesterday, I went over to Katy's discernment house for an afternoon of baking yeast bread by hand (our first time ever) and an evening with dinner and a Holy Hour. It was a full weekend, that is sure.

Well, that's all for now. I'll add a second social life post next weekend. Peace!

A view of the ministry

First off, I'll attempt to update this blog once a week, probably sometime around the weekend. Now that my laptop is back from being repaired and appears to be working, I can do this from home. Having access to the internet through work or the library is not the most convenient thing.
Anyway, I've been in MN for just over two weeks now so I have a better idea of what is happening at the parish. I would like to let you know about it so you can keep us in your prayers and offer any feedback if you have some insights.

The big event of the week, besides Sunday Mass of course, is the School of St. Paul on Wednesday nights. The school is a missionary formation program run by the parish to help potential leaders from the parish encounter Christ and the Emmanuel Community charisms (praise, adoration, evangelization, etc.), be catechized, and then sent on mission in the neighborhood of the parish. I came in towards the end of the encounter stage, which included teachings on praise, the conversion of St. Paul, the Word of God, and fraternal charity. The next stage, Catechesis, will include talks on salvation history, divine revelation and authority, the sacraments, Mary, and one more that slips my mind. The last stage will teach about mission and the new evangelization, practical points for giving testimony and speaking to people about God, sin and mercy, and the question of suffering.

As for the format, the night begins with a praise song and prayer. This is followed by a 30 minute teaching and 20 minutes of sharing. Up to this point, the groups are split by language, Spanish or English. After the teaching and sharing, the groups join in the church for a time of bilingual praise and usually adoration. The praise and adoration last around 25 minutes and after a closing prayer or blessing by Fr. Joseph, the night is over. The whole thing lasts an hour and a half.

I've only had two weeks to observe the program, but it looks really good to me. The first night, a visiting priest who was going to speak to the Hispanic group forgot to come so Fr. Joseph delivered his teaching in both languages. It was the first time the groups had shared a teaching in the same room and while you would miss parts of the teaching if you didn't understand both languages, the general consensus is that the night build community between the groups because we would laugh at the same story and be around each other. This growth in community between the language groups led to an idea for the next week, which was an icebreaker to learn names during the time of praise. While the clump of Anglo names at the beginning proved to be a challenge for the Latinos who followed them, the rapidly listed Spanish names at the end proved to be equally challenging to remember for us English speakers. The exercise was good for a laugh and did what its purpose was, which was to increase communication between the two groups. After the night was officially over, I observed pairs or triplets of people speaking in Spanglish or with translation.

The second big event for me during the week is the Spanish Holy Hour and Mass that happens on Thursday nights. Some of you may be thinking, "Wow, Heather, I didn't realize you were so competent in Spanish to participate in such activities." Well, you are right. I'm not fully competent, but I try and that is good enough for the embracing and forgiving Spanish-speaking community at St. Stephen's. Fr. Joseph introduced me at the Thursday Mass last week, explaining that I was at St. Stephen's for four months to help with the mission preparation, and so many ladies gave me hugs and kisses and welcomed me to the parish. One sweetheart of a woman, Raquel, told me I could come to her house anytime for food or a nap, I just had to give her a call. At least that is what I put together from the parts I understood. What a generous and loving community.

As to what I'm working on right now, the school is making a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin at the end of the month and I have to coordinate the logistics for that along with Deacon Luis Rubi. Today that means making a flyer and printing it in time for the meeting tonight, but first I have to nail down a price for the coach we will be renting. It's always an adventure at the parish and every day is different. Whatever needs to be done for the mission, I'm the point woman.

P.S. Pictures will come soon. Now that I have my laptop, I can load them with the card reader.