For the first time in my priesthood, I was not at my assignment for the celebration of the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus, King of the Universe (aka Christ the King). Instead, I was at the Newman Center chapel at UW in Seattle, celebrating the nuptials of Gina & Clayton. I have been looking forward to this celebration for the better part of the year – it was a privilege and an honor to be the priest who led them in their exchange of consent at their wedding Mass (presided over and preached by the former Newman center chaplain, Father Chrysostom Mijinke, OP). Adding to the joy of the day was the fact that it was the memorial of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians (Gina has been a longtime choir member at her parish). Especially through her intercession, may the Lord bless Clayton & Gina as they begin their new life together: ad multos annos!!

Back here on the home front, we prepare for Thanksgiving, Advent, the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th – a holy day of obligation, remember), the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and sooner than we think, Christmas! I am proud of our liturgical leaders here on the Olympic Peninsula – not only are we ready for all of these, but we are gathering soon to plan out Lent, Holy Week, and Easter! It is a welcome reminder that there is no such thing as ‘just’ a Mass; every liturgical celebration is the coming together of many, many talented and generous people to help the Body of Christ join in prayer & worship that is worthy of the One to Whom our offering is made. The next time you’re at Mass, consider offering a word of encouragement and thanks to those who offer their time to help make it possible! They are a blessing to us all.

Regular visitors to my blog likely have noticed a couple of things lately. The first is that the site is subtly different: it’s faster! I recently made some upgrades on the back AND front end of the website. I am now the proud manager of a VPS (virtual private server), which translates to more memory & processing power for the website….provided I don’t get crazy and start doing all the things! This has been most notable at the liturgy calendars page, which takes substantially less time (but still a few seconds) to load. I’ve also upgraded to a new version of Divi, the theme that I use for my website (hat tip to T&G – you know who you are!). Speed gains have not been as noticable (to my amateur eye, at least), but it IS a lot easy to manage the site. That said, there have been little glitches – especially around font size. If you are browsing around and notice a paragraph that is much smaller than all the other text, please post a comment to notify me – I’ve gone through every post to make corrections, but it may be that I missed one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The second change has been the frequency of posting – this is the first pastor’s post I’ve put up for the entire month of November. My intention had been to write three things each week: my pastor’s insert for the bulletin, a pastor’s post, and a reflection of my choosing (the latter two here on the website). The reflections come as inspiration hits, but the pastor’s posts have been more & more difficult to muster up the enthusiasm to compose. It hit me recently that the problem has been the weekly saints & celebrations feature: I’ve been spending so much time researching the chosen saints or celebrations, finding links to share, AND find/upload/label/format related images that by the time that part is done, the enthusiasm has been sucked right out of me. What were meant to be add-ons to the real point (this section where I can ramble on about the previous and/or upcoming week) have become deterrents.

Rather than ditch that feature altogether, I’m going to try reducing the amount of time & effort I put into them. I enjoy researching the saints of the week (I learn a lot myself!) and it is fun to read and then link to neat resources about them, so I’m going to focus on that and drop the images. We’ll see how this goes and adjust from there – bear with me as I continue to figure this out!

In any case, I hope you all have wonderful Thanksgiving celebrations surrounded by loved ones. If you’re in the Port Angeles area, there will be a Thanksgiving Mass at 9:30 am with dinner served at the gym from noon until 3 pm. Where ever you land, may we raise our hearts & souls in praise to God for His many blessings!