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Best wishes to our young adult Confirmation candidates! Next Sunday at 4:00 PM Bishop Joseph Perry will confirm 72 of our young adults and welcome them into full membership in the Church. It is always a privilege to witness this outpouring of the Holy Spirit with its consequent promise of a bright future for the Church. We welcome Bishop Perry home to Saint Joseph’s and congratulate our young people. We pray that they will always be strong and effective witnesses of our Savior in our world! Remember the ecumenical Thanksgiving Prayer Service. On Wednesday, November 26th at 7:30 PM Saint Joseph’s will host the annual interfaith Thanksgiving eve prayer service. And it is an honor for us to do so. Please plan to come and join our sisters and brothers of other faiths to give thanks to God for his bountiful gifts. The Viking Choir from Homewood-Flossmoor High School will provide their usual high-caliber selections. One of the local clergy will preach the sermon. And a free will offering will be taken up to help fund the outreach of Respond Now. Please also remember that there will be a Thanksgiving Liturgy at Saint Joseph’s at 9:30 AM Thanksgiving Day. Our Festival Choir’s presence will ensure that this will be a beautiful and prayerful experience for us all. Please try to share both of these services. A Gospel reflection: Using our many talents. In today’s Gospel we hear Our Lord’s familiar parable about the talents entrusted to three servants. (A talent was a unit of silver or gold in Jesus’ time.) The first two servants made wise use of their talents by investing them. Each of them thus doubled his tally of talents. The third servant, afraid to take a risk, buried his talent and gave it back to his master at reckoning time. His lack of initiative earned him his master’s ire. As we draw to the end of the liturgical year, the Church directs our thoughts toward the end of the world, our death and the final judgment. Each one of us will have to give an account to the Lord about how we have spent our life and about how we have used our talents. I feel that at the judgment he’s going to be most interested in the good we have done...or have left undone. In other words, how have we used our greatest talent, life itself, to give praise to God and bring love and healing to our sisters and brothers. It may not be the most pleasant thought, but it is a true one: Life is short and none of us is guaranteed tomorrow. We should not put off doing that good deed, apologizing for that hurt, reaching out a hand to help, offering words of warm encouragement, expressing sorrow and atoning for sin. Using our talents thus, we can ensure that we will hear Christ’s words in the Gospel: “Well done, my good and faithful servant!” Saint Joseph, pray for us, and let us pray for each other!
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