Wednesday |
Fulfilling Hope
Documents:
Fulfilling Hope Case Statement (Large PDF)
Printable Pledge Card for Fulfilling Hope (PDF)
Electronic Funds Authorization Information and Form (PDF)
Stock Transfer Instructions (PDF)
Impact Report:
Parish Impact through pro-life petition against FOCA: Thank you OLOL parishioners for your participation in the petition against FOCA. More than 6,200 individual cards were stamped and mailed. Percentage of participation from OLOL is approximately 90% or greater. In addition, $897 was collected to help cover the cost of postage. Thank you! We specifically asked Sen. Mark Udall whether mail from constituents is read. He and his aide both replied, "Yes." We will follow up with the action that will be taken in Colorado concerning FOCA.
Ministries & Events:
- New Parishioner Welcome: Welcoming of new parishioners to our parish especially during our Open House receptions during the year.
- Family Picnic: Join us this this summer for some good ol' fashioned family fun!
- Stewardship Faire: Learn about and join the ministries of OLOL. Face-to-face information available from people already involved. The faire takes place at the end of the summer.
- Volunteer Appreciation: Celebrate All Saints' Day with a special Mass and reception for all our wonderful volunteers.
Trust in the Lord,
Together let us Praise His Name.
Stewardship is a word that incites many different meanings to people. Some consider it to be a manner of frugality, others use the word stewardship in context of conservation of the earth, and yet others, when hearing the word stewardship, reduce it to the activity of making charitable gifts.
So how are we to understand stewardship as Catholics? Stewardship is a specific mentality that affects freedom in one's life, and is absolutely juxtaposed to today's mentality of self-interest and the idea of being wholly self-autonomous. Stewardship is our pathway out of self-interest. It means being stewards of 100% of all God has given us in every aspect of our lives, not just a separate activity that is only done at church. It provides one with an ethos from which one proceeds from putting into proper context our family lifestyles, business objectives, and such trends as conservationism, frugality, and self-interested philanthropy. It is a natural virtue rooted in the spirituality of our Holy Mother of God, Mary - representing the most perfect image of freedom.
There is a battle of freedoms throughout all history, and we experience this battle profoundly in this age. In the beginning, Adam and Eve were confronted with two freedoms: The freedom that comes from trusting in the Lord, as stewards with all that He has given them in creation and in complete confidence that the Creator will provide them with all their needs as stewards - in cooperation with caring for the garden of Eden; verses the idea of another kind of freedom experienced at the Tree of Knowledge, a freedom that presents itself as godlike and influences mankind to believe in the lie that man can live apart - or free - from God and thereby, "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps."
We know what happens when the latter freedom is chosen as the ideal. It inevitably leads to creating structures of oppression, destruction and death. We see this play out clearly in our own times, with our own ideas and definitions of the value and dignity of persons, structures of oppressive government, and economies that seek self-interest in spite of poverties and bondage to creditors. This is what Pope John Paul II spoke to and warned as the culture of death. He wrote, in his encyclical le tter, Centesimus Annus, "Serious ecological problems call for an effective change of mentality leading to the adoption of new lifestyles, in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of the common good are the factors that determine consumer choices, savings and investments."
The New Adam and New Eve (Jesus and Mary) represent the stewardship mentality in all its fullness. This entails a unified Gospel spirituality: there is a single basic spirituality for all Christians, and Mary is the model of that spirituality. In light of this, stewardship and the economic life, like all other aspects of life, must be formed from within the liberation effected by God in Jesus Christ, and by example Mary's fiat - her yes to the Angel of the Lord, her promise to God - and Magnificat, or grateful exclamation of the greatness of God's blessings upon her.
Thus, through the Marian fiat and Magnificat, through her lowliness as handmaid, Mary is enabled to proclaim the greatness of the Lord. Her emptiness and her humility are what make it possible for her soul to magnify - not herself, but the Lord. Thus her fiat reveals in all its profundity what it means to be a creature and steward of creation. Her fiat expresses the dependent relation on God that discloses the inner meaning of all reality as gift , which in turn disposes one towards service. All that I am and have, has been given by God in Jesus Christ; and what has been given is to be shared. A love that is received is meant to be passed on - and thereby to be increased. Only thus do created beings give glory to, and magnify, the Lord. A spirituality formed in the fiat and, in turn, in the Magnificat, is a spirituality characterized by gratitude and thanksgiving; by humility and wonder; by an affirmation of life, of the intrinsic worth - beauty, goodness, and truth - of all things (because created by God); by a disposition of service towards, and solidarity with, others. In sum, one formed in the fiat and the Magnificat is a self whose disposition of grateful receiving informs all its doing, having, and making - a self that recognizes that it is, strictly, never the owner of its being and its acting.
Lenny Best
Director of Stewardship and Development