A month of firsts

Today marks the first month for me in my parish and it is my first quieter day in a while. With all of the feasts and other things going on in the past week, I have been running pretty hard (the feast of All Souls is a very big deal here and is even a national holiday!). The wonderful thing about that is it means that I am getting ever more integrated into parish life here.

This past week has been one of many firsts for me in this parish. I had my first wedding, my first procession, my first anointing of the sick, my first confessions, and coming up on Sunday, my first baptisms. I will also have my first mass with the kids of the school tomorrow for the first Friday of the month.

With each of these firsts, I learn a little bit more about the people here and come to understand them better – and vice versa. Every time I meet someone from the village, I am surprised at how open and friendly they are. Again and again I hear just how thankful they are to finally have a priest again and each time I also hear the offer to help with anything I need. I am genuinely impressed by the people here and truly happy to be with them. I am also very happy to have such offers of help, because until now, I have almost no one to help with anything. Can you imagine a parish where the priest has to do absolutely everything himself from sacristy work, flowers, ringing the bells, looking up baptismal certificates, marriage prep, baptismal prep, cleaning the church, etc. It is not the most effective use of resources. Needless to say, there are a lot of ways that people can help me, and so I will soon start asking.

I am slowly coming to understand also that there is a certain lack of understanding of the importance of the Mass, especially on Sundays. For example, last week, all of the first communion candidates weren’t at Sunday mass because there was a birthday party and on the same weekend, almost no one else came to mass who attended the wedding. The wedding was without the mass, but for them, they had already been to church once that weekend, so that must count.

By the way, according to the records in the church, this was the third wedding in as many years.