Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

When I was a young child, at an early age, I struggled with hand-eye coordination, and my parents took me to see a child development specialist to discern how to help me develop these skills. You can imagine how excited I was when my child development specialist recommended that my parents purchase a Nintendo video game system to help me develop these skills. However, as I grew in my hand-eye coordination skills playing video games, my inner perfectionism also grew. Often times, if I made a mistake in a game, I would simply restart the game to correct my mistake so that I could play each level with perfection. Over time, like many other people with perfectionist tendencies, I had to learn to let go of my perfectionism, accepting human errors and embracing the important lesson of continuing on with a task even though it isn’t perfect.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

The context behind the Mosaic Law was relationship. God desired an intimate relationship with His people and He prohibited certain activities that would cause damage to this relationship. However, as we all know, an intimate relationship must be built on so much more than merely avoiding certain activities. An intimate relationship also involves entrusting one’s heart to another. This is how Jesus fulfills the Law. A central aspect of Jesus’ mission is to transform human hearts, which goes beyond mere physical activity and the capacity of the Law.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Salt, as we all know, is one of the most common food seasonings and an essential ingredient for food preservation. When food tastes bland, we add salt to it so as to give it more “taste.” In a sense, you could say that salt helps bring out the flavor of something; makes it fully itself and in keeping with its proper nature. Salt enhances the quality of other things and keeps them from becoming “insipid,” or “tasteless.” In Biblical Greek, the word for this is, moraino, which means “foolish.” Salt, in this usage, draws a thing out of foolishness and into beauty, truth and wisdom.

Dear SFdA Parishioners,

This week, San Francisco de Asis Catholic School will have their accreditation visit. Catholic schools throughout Arizona go through an accreditation process where the quality of Catholic education is measured. This accrediting process assures the primacy of faith formation and educational excellence. A team of six members will spend three full days at our school. During this time they will observe classrooms, interview teachers, parents, and students, and use their findings to determine our accreditation results.