Recycling Fabric

Help the earth by donating for resale your old clothes that are in good condition, or recycling the clothes that have stains or spots and cannot be worn again.  Either way, do not throw clothing in the trash! If it can no longer be worn, you can put it in a recycling box which can often be found on school and church parking lots.  Even if it is for profit it is better to recycle it than throw it in the trash.

 Check out the link below to find out more information!

 http://www.upworthy.com/why-people-keep-doing-the-one-thing-they-shouldnt-with-old-clothes?c=upw1&u=3e07e7e632c41f29e23c0bcd64bff1d4c4c40721

Summer BBQs

Summer BBQs hosted by SCF members are among the fun activities for our community.  This year we hope to have one each month of the summer: June, July and August.  Volunteers are needed to host a BBQ at their homes, and traditionally, we have had them on a Sunday.  The host provides the place for the event plus a main course and those who attend bring everything else.

If you are willing to be a host, please email Susan MacIsaac; mackleinusa@gmail.com or call her at 980.229.1879 or you can talk with her or Caroline Reardon after Mass on Saturday.

If you are at Sunday Mass and wish to volunteer, please tell Jim Schratz or contact Susan.

Join the Celebration

Marilyn and Clarence Heller will be renewing their wedding vows during Mass on Saturday, June 3. Please help them celebrate forty years of marital bliss at the reception in the Fireside Room immediately following Mass. There will be hors d'oeuvres, Prosecco and (of course) wedding cake!

Save the Dates:

Parish Renewal Weekend in September

Mark your calendars for Friday evening, September 15 and Saturday, September 16, day and evening at the Mead Center. A rich and engaging opportunity is coming to Sts. Clare & Francis as we have our first-ever Parish Renewal Weekend. A team of community members is working on creating a program designed to further our sense of belonging to one another, gain a deeper awareness of our goodness, and discover the hidden energy of God within. It will be a time to grow our sense of belonging to one another, to rekindle our faith together, and discover the hidden energy of God within all of us.

You won’t want to miss this one, so be sure to put this on your calendar and watch for more details coming soon. 

Sharing Your Gifts with SCF

The miracle of Sts. Clare & Francis continues to give hope to many, many people throughout our area because of the backing of people like you.  To volunteer to participate at SCF or to pledge financially toward keeping us going, please click here.  We’d love to hear from you.  Thanks for your support! 

Parish Office Hours 

The Sts. Clare & Francis Office, [483 E Lockwood Ave, Ste. 3, Schultz Hall (Door B) – Eden Theological Seminary, Webster Groves, MO 63119] will be open each week on Mondays, from 10:00 am – 1:00 pm and Thursdays from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. Although someone is here more often than that, I am in and out much of the time. So I am making a concerted effort to have posted hours to be more available to people who might want to drop by. 

Thanks! 

Jim

When Jesus talks about Oneness, he is not speaking in an Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself divine. Rather, what he has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other. 

His most beautiful symbol for this is in John 15 where he says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you.” A few verses later he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.” While he does indeed claim that “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30)—a statement so blasphemous to Jewish ears that it nearly gets Jesus stoned—he does not see this as an exclusive privilege but as something shared by all human beings. There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual inter-abiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine love. 

We flow into God—and God into us—because it is the nature of love to flow. And as we give ourselves into one another in this fashion, the vine gives life and coherence to the branch while the branch makes visible what the vine is. (After all, a vine is merely an abstraction until there are actual branches to articulate its reality.) The whole and the part live together in mutual, loving reciprocity, each belonging to the other and dependent on the other to show forth the fullness of love. That’s Jesus’ vision of no separation between human and Divine.

No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’ teachings is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31, Matthew 22:39). But we almost always hear that wrong: “Love your neighbor as much as yourself.” (And of course, the next logical question then becomes, “But I have to love me first, don’t I, before I can love my neighbor?”) If you listen closely to Jesus however, there is no “as much as” in his admonition. It’s just “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend charity to the other; there are simply two cells of the one great Life. Each of them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying down one’s life for another” is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self. 

Cynthia Bourgeault