It's time to note one recent event and two upcoming.
First of all, on Sunday, Feb. 8, St. Jude Parish, Rochester, hosted a dialogue session for young Catholics and Muslims, and I was pleased to be an adult guest there. It was a very enjoyable initial session and the young people are looking forward to further opportunities to consider how Islam and Christianity converge and differ. The food was great, too. Thanks to the Muslim adult leaders, and to Dan Frachey and Father Dean Probst of St. Jude.
As we seek to enhance respect for human life, we know that one extremely practical way to carry out such respect is by volunteering as an organ or tissue donor. The Gift of Hope organ procurement organization is opening a new facility in Springfield at 2401 Memphis Drive, and an open house is being held from 1-7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 19. Representatives of various world religions will be on hand to offer prayer at the beginning of this open-house period.
We may tell ourselves that there are all sorts of barriers separating groups of people from one another, when in fact human beings share a universality of experience at every level of existence. We all have health issues, and we have learned that the desire to relieve suffering leads to profound acts of human-to-human solidarity. We must remember to register our will to donate organs or tissue when we obtain a driver's license; also, we must make it clear to our close family members that we want to serve in this manner should the occasion arise.
It's a principle among those seeking Christian unity that whatever we can do together, we must do together. And here in the season of Lent, there's a devotion which we may think of as exclusively Catholic, but which in fact is accessible and meaningful to many Christians: namely, the Stations of the Cross. Christians who visit Jerusalem follow the path of the Way of the Cross through the narrow streets of the Old City and into the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre. We have placed the Stations in our churches because we want to make sure that those who do not reach Jerusalem can still join in this most precious of pilgrimages: the steps which Jesus walked with the cross to the hill of Calvary, to lay down his life for the salvation of humanity.
Pastor Lee Legg of Waverly United Methodist Church has invited me to lead meditations at an ecumenical celebration of the Stations of the Cross on Wednesday of Holy Week, April 1, 7 p.m., at Waverly United Methodist, on the south side of the square in Waverly. Please join us for this celebration.
We Christians are ever amazed as we ponder the core of our faith: that the Son of God willed to join his life to ours, and to offer his life out of love for people subject to death. We pause and reflect at the remembrance of the various events which occurred on the Way of the Cross, and we find ourselves, having so reflected, better disposed toward affirming our kinship with people struggling everywhere.