You are welcome to come and pray before the Blessed Sacrament this first Wednesday of the month, from after the noon mass until Benediction at 7:00pm. Adoration. Come for a half hour, or even longer and experience the peace that comes from resting in silence before Jesus. This opportunity for prayer is always available on the first Wednesday of each month, but the Lenten season might motivate you to attend.
This weekend we welcome the Little Sisters of the Poor from Toledo to make their annual appeal. The sisters run their network of homes primarily on the generosity of benefactors. I constantly hear how well the elderly poor are cared for by the Little Sisters. Thank you for your generosity to them.
On March 8, Lift Up Southfield, our local interfaith ministerial association, is sponsoring a talk by Dr. Salie on Islam and Free Speech: Religious Toleration in a Modern World. This evening event begins at 6:00pm with an Indian dinner, ($5.00) and will be held at Peace Lutheran Church on 17029 West 13 Mile in Southfield. Reservations are required, so please call our parish office to let us know how many are coming from Transfiguration Parish. Dr. Salie is the founder and director of the Islamic Studies program, and teaches Arabic at the University of Detroit Mercy. Fr. Jeremy and I hope to see many of you at this event.
From The Joy of the Gospel "Isolation . . . can find expression in a false autonomy which has no place for God. But in the realm of religion it can also take the form of a spiritual consumerism tailored to one’s own unhealthy individualism. The return to the sacred and the quest for spirituality which mark our own time are ambiguous phenomena. Today, our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing of us with regard to others. Unless these people find in the Church a spirituality which can offer healing and liberation, and fill them with life and peace, while at the same time summoning them to fraternal communion and missionary fruitfulness, they will end up by being taken in by solutions which neither make life truly human nor give glory to God." [89]