To view this newsletter as a PDF, click the link below to download. You can also read it in the email below: a reflection on all that has happened in the last few months at La Sagrada Familia; an article about tuning into the saints and our new podcast “All Saints Almanac”; and thoughts on the Archbishop of San Antonio’s new pastoral letter on immigration; and more!
Ignatian Examen - What’s Happened and Where We’re Headed Through the Eyes of the Heart
It’s been nearly five months since our last newsletter. We want to share an Ignatian Examen on what has happened since then. The Examen is a method of prayer taught by St. Ignatius of Loyola for reflecting on your day (or in this case a season) in order to notice God’s presence in the details of your life. If you aren’t familiar with it, you can read more at www.ignatianspirituality.com. We hope the practice gives us the chance not only to share about past and upcoming events, but to let the past percolate into our hearts and inspire us for what is to come.
Ask God for Light.
God, help us to see La Sagrada Familia with eyes that are more forgiving, courageous, and kinder than our own.
Give thanks.
Thank you for the birth of our daughter Martha on May 26!
Thank you for ponds and lakes in summer and the vibrancy of fall foliage in New England after two autumns in El Paso.
Thank you for all who have given to the ministry in support of the new paint on the barn (bye,bye lead!).
Thank you for mentorship! Martha Hennessy came for lunch and met our Martha, and we cherished two full days with our mentors Dennis and Tensie visiting from Beatitude House in Guadalupe, CA. What a joy to hug them, stay up late talking, share delicious food from the garden, and have them bless our children.
Thank you for all the generous donations to the GoFundMe to support migrant friends detained by ICE in Keene and the wider community.
Review the season
We felt in consolation, full of faith, hope and love when:
A relationship that began with tutoring someone in English evolved into coordinating his visits to the local jail as a Spanish-speaking volunteer.
We worked with friends at Welcoming New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Alliance for Immigrant Rights, and Fuerza Farmworkers Fund to host a film about immigrant organizing (“Without Shade, Without Rest”) at the Keene library.
We celebrated Martha’s baptism in a bilingual service with Father Timothy Danaher and 50+ friends.
Duncan studied the Bible with men on Units D&K every Monday at the Cheshire County Jail.
The principal at the local Catholic School invited us to be musicians at the school Mass celebrating Latino Heritage month and having the honor of praying and singing with Spanish-speaking friends in the language of our conversion.
We felt in desolation, far from God’s will when:
With a newborn and without much sleep, we tried to do too much traveling.
The ICE activity in Keene in August surfaced not only latent anti-immigrant attitudes in the town but also led to harm caused by people in the name of helping and protecting immigrants: providing to the media so many details about the migrants who were impacted personally by the raid that their sense of anonymity and security was lost; holding signs in the center of town bearing crude slogans against ICE that did not express what many immigrants felt but did embolden people with anti-immigrant attitudes to shout, gesture, and honk, thereby increasing fear.
Shortcomings
Those dang GoFundMe fees. If we’re called to do mutual aid again in service of our community we want to be ready - legally, technically, organizationally - to use the apparatus of the non-profit.
One line on Day 9 of a novena to St. Joseph read, “Give us your love of poverty so that we live contentedly, let wealth come or go.” We have received much and given much away. We still wrestle with shame and guilt (are we doing enough?), even when we’re surrounded by God’s abundance.
Look toward the season to come
As a new Catholic, Duncan wants to reboot his interview podcast, Religious Life, exploring ethics, theology, church history, and the opportunities and challenges for being faithful today.
Getting our shovels out, renting a trailer to transport stone, and installing a drip line to preserve the new paint on the barn.
As a Eucharistic Minister, Duncan will work with Fr. Josh to design a communion service and bring communion to the men who are incarcerated.
Exploring the possibility that we are not creating a house of hospitality but a network of hospitality. Peter Maurin’s vision was that every Christian household have a “Christ Room” for welcoming the stranger. Can we try to do that in community with others?
Tuning Into the Saints
By Duncan
“This is the wager: that Jesus, the living master, is real, alive, intimately and vibrantly enfolding right now. He is more present, in fact, than even our breath and our heartbeat. But to really know this presence we need to tune in on a different wavelength: to shift from our usual egoic operating system to the heart frequency where Jesus broadcasts.”
-Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest and contemplative teacher, The Wisdom Jesus
It’s a painful and scary time if you care about American democracy, human intelligence, public decency, or a livable future for your children and grandchildren. The social wavelength so many of us have tuned into for so long - go to college, get a good job and house, provide a better life for your kids than your parents provided for you, save prudently for retirement in a stable economy in a gradually democratizing world - sounds ever more distant and crackly. Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice?
Fortunately, it’s still a great time to be a Christian. As Cynthia Bourgeault writes, Jesus is more present than our breath if we tune in on the heart frequency. In fact, with the station many of us having been listening to turning staticky, it may be a more opportune, more obvious time to be a Christian than it has been in recent decades.
So, how do you tune in to the frequency where Jesus broadcasts? There are many. One I’ve fallen in love with as a new Catholic is learning about the lives of saints. They operated on the Jesus wavelength, often during times even more tumultuous than ours. I’ve found learning about their lives not only to be intellectually stimulating but a joyful reminder that whatever is ending is not the world but a world, and something richer is both on its way and already here.
From Oct. 12 until the start of Advent on Nov. 29, with the blessing of Orbis Books publisher Robert Ellsberg and the good folks at Liturgical Press, I’m piloting a 5 days/week, 5 minute-long podcast on the lives of the saints based on Ellsberg’s daily readers on the lives of saintly witnesses: Blessed Among Us, Volumes 1 and 2. My inspiration - in content and structure - is part 12-step daily reader and part Garrison Keillor’s former NPR segment,“The Writer’s Almanac”. Each episode has three parts: a few words about the saint of the day and a quotation from that saint’s written works; a reflection from a saintly writer; and finally, a prayer.
If you go to lasagradafamiliacw.org and click on “All Saints Almanac” at the top of the page you can subscribe to receive the podcast daily in your email, or you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you listen to podcasts. Just put “All Saints Almanac” in the search bar to find it. Write me at lasagradafamilianh@gmail.com if you need help finding the podcast or if you have input about how to improve the pilot.
Oct. 15 - St. Teresa of Avila - Mystic, Doctor of the Church (1515-1582)
You can donate to La Sagrada Familia Catholic Worker, or make a prayer request at lasagradafamiliacw.org
“Thank You For Coming To Us”
Reflecting from New Hampshire on the pastoral letter of San Antonio’s Archbishop
By Bethany
On August 3, Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio published a pastoral letter, “We Will Come to You,” about the current U.S. practices of detention and mass deportation. He promised that the Church would come to the aid of the immigrant community because “the system of immigration does not uphold the dignity of the human person, the integrity of the family, the common good, and the protection of the most vulnerable.” It is a heartfelt and theologically-grounded assurance that the work of the U.S. Catholic Church is to welcome and accompany those who are here on a journey from somewhere else.
We recommend reading it; and yet, based on our experience in the Northeast, it feels important to write not only a pastoral letter to the immigrant Church but also a thank you letter for their presence with us: “Thank you for coming to us.”
We have come to know the people in our neighborhood from Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. We’ve met at the library, the post office, the grocery store, and while playing in family gymnastic classes at the YMCA. We were delighted to find that we go to the same Church. Thank you for your friendship.
When we have had the opportunity to attend a Spanish service together, the mystery of Mass has been deepened for us by hearing the liturgy in a language other than English. We have learned joyous music to sing and beautiful ways to celebrate liturgical holidays. Practicing Lectio Divina in the women’s Bible study has been a blessing to my heart. Thank you for your faith and devotion.
Our relationships with people from different nationalities and backgrounds deepened amidst the crisis of ICE activity. Rather than worry about how to respond to the urgency of the moment, we were asked and shown how to be useful by our fellow parishioners. We wrote character letters for men who had been arrested, an easy task given our friendships, experience writing letters of recommendation for so many high school students over the years, and even having a letterhead for La Sagrada Familia. A team was quickly created to develop a mutual aid fund and food distribution program in collaboration with a local farm. Thank you for your wisdom, which helps us as we do the work to uncover and reject the idols of nationalism, racism, and capitalism.
Finally, when celebrating Martha’s baptism in a bilingual service with Father Timothy Danaher and 50+ friends, we welcomed her into the Church in its universality. How wonderful! Thank you!
The LSF Fall Challenge
Below you will find a few pictures from this previous season of our lives. Their captions are intentionally left unwritten. That’s where YOU come in! If you’ve read the content of the newsletter, we think you will know what is happening in the pictures. Write a short caption for each image and email it to lasagradafamilianh@gmail.com or text to Bethany at (802)246-7393. Everyone who participates will get a prize, and we will publish our favorite captions in the next newsletter!
Please support La Sagrada Familia with a financial gift
Your gift supports us as we continue to build a community aiming for: mercy and welcome; nonviolence; simplicity. To make a financial gift:
Make a one-time or recurring monthly donation online. This method accepts major credit and debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App Pay)
Mail a check payable to ”La Sagrada Familia” to: 111 Adams St #2, Keene NH 03431
*La Sagrada Familia is a 501(c)(3) so all donations are tax-deductible. Our EIN is 41-4927544.