Pastor Dinners
Now that the initial chaos of Partners has settled somewhat, I am trying to get back to some normal priestly practices, one of which is dinner with parish families. Unfortunately, I have really backed myself into a corner on this one. There are seven nights in a week, and none of them are great.
- Sunday: I am so exhausted from pouring everything I have into weekend Masses that I am exceedingly poor company, and so I have a long-standing policy of not scheduling social activities on Sunday evenings.
- Monday: My day off. Being an introvert, this means no social engagements.
- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday: all have Masses that end around 6:30pm.
- Friday: 1st and 3rd Fridays are for Regional and Deanery priest dinners, respectively. Often the 2nd or 4th are used to visit family/friends outside of the county.
The upshot is that I have left myself basically no nights in a month in which it is possible to hang out at someone’s house. This is a marked contrast to the 3 nights each week I had in my years just with Assumption. I am honestly not sure what to do about this, short of changing the daily Mass schedule.
For now, I am going to try to reserve 7:00 – 9:00 pm on 50% of my Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for some kind of social time. Given those time constraints and drive times, a lot of this is going to have to be going out to dinner with folks near whatever church I just said Mass at, rather than going to their houses, but that is just a reality we are going to have to get used to.
So if you want to go out to dinner together in Ferndale (Tue., Thur.), Lynden (Wed.), or Bellingham (Sat.), please contact priests@whatcomcatholic.org and Liliana will see what she can do. If you can get multiple families together, all the better, since the opportunities are so limited.
Re-Evaluating Partners Assumptions
Now that we are 6 months in to Partners in the Gospel, it is time to re-evaluate a lot of the assumptions I made back is May, June, and July about things like Mass scheduling and budgeting. (All those posts can be found at https://www.whatcomcatholic.org/updates).
With the Sunday Masses, is two months with the same vicar a good timeframe? Or is it better for everyone to have a different priest each weekend? With the daily Masses, does it make sense to have the same priest generally say the same Mass? Et cetera. If you have thoughts on how these assumptions have been playing out, or if the last six months have taught us something new, please let me know. frmoore@whatcomcatholic.org.
Fr. Moore 