A Blessed Trinity Sunday to all of you!

Pastor’s Notes

ReveRend Rodel G. BalaGtas

LET’S celebrate! Hieu Nguyen, who we adopted as our seminarian and spent his parish internship and diaconate year with us, is now an ordained priest! We witnessed his journey to the priesthood when we listened to his homilies and saw him interact with and minister to parishioners.

Indeed, Fr. Hieu Nguyen is God’s wonder! His vocation story has impressed us: from being a Doctor of Physics, he is now a “Doctor of the Soul.” What a dramatic journey for him and a pleasant surprise for his family, friends, and all!

His amazing vocation story and those of his classmates reveal God’s hand working in the present. Yes, God is actively engaged in our lives. He would never stop calling people to serve him through the ministry of ordained priesthood or religious life and lay pastoral work.

The world needs artists, poets, teachers, and, yes, preaches, pastors, and priests, not just engineers, physicians, architects, accountants, politicians, economists, business people, and the like. We need men and women who can express through art, music, liturgy, and oral and written word the human heart’s longings and God’s designs for the world and humanity.

And so, how fittingly fabulous that on this Sunday’s Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity—a celebration of God’s mystery-we witness Fr. Hieu celebrate his First Mass in our parish! Praise God for all his wonders!

Last week, as I spent my annual retreat reading John O’Dononue’s book Eternal Echoes, Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong, I could not help but reflect on the challenges of our secular culture and seeing the critical work of revealing the Sacred in our midst. O’Donohue’s insights on the presence of God in the world and humanity are fascinatingly relevant to the challenges of our times. Here’s a compelling excerpt from his book:

We lament today the absence of God and the demise of the sacred. Yet it is we ourselves who have killed God. The world today is just as full of the sacred presence as it was centuries ago… Dostoyevsky said, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” All the horizons become flattened, and the wells dry up. We no longer walk the earth with wonder. We have purchased the fatal ticket. Instead of being guests of the earth, we are now crowded passengers on the runaway train of progress and productivity; the windows are