Good News Ministries of Seattle
Newsletter

SEPTEMBER, 2011 NEWSLETTER & TEACHIMONY

It's good to be writing to you again, and Peg and I send our greetings to all you holy, saintly, precious, unique, original, one of a kind, redeemed, forgiven and loved sons, daughters and masterpieces of God's love and glorious creation!  To all of you who have made donations to our ministry endeavors since our last Newsletter, we thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts!! 

Over the last four months, we have conducted three parish missions here in Washington and one Catholic Tent Revival in New Jersey.  As usual, each mission and revival is unique in its own way, and God blessed these events tremendously in our being able to allow Him to touch many of the attendees in a very special and precious way.  The scheduling of our parish missions has slowed down a great deal due to the present state of the economy and apparent feelings of financial uncertainty about the future.  We trust in our Lord, however, to turn this trend around when and if He feels the time is appropriate..smile.

The events that we presently have scheduled for the next twelve months are:

In this newsletter, we want to continue our theme relating to the love, mercy and forgiveness that our Lord is calling each of us to live in the daily events and experiences of our lives.  In our last newsletter, we concluded with a discussion on our willingness to return good for evil.  The next topic that we want to reflect upon is our willingness to include the excluded.  The poor, the homeless, the thieves, the harlots and all the other outcasts of their society loved our Lord Jesus, because He sincerely cared for them and included them in His love and respect…..He never excluded them in any way.  Jesus models for all of us the way in which we are to respond to the “rejects” of our own society. 

One of the young men from Columbine High School had written in a journal found after the tragedy, that he was going to do what would follow because of his hatred for all the people who had excluded him in so many ways during his life.  Have you ever felt excluded from a group or situation in which you deeply desired to be included?  It’s no fun, is it?  These two young men were kind of frail of stature…..were kind of pale in their complexion…..were not good students or good athletes, and so their classmates teased and excluded them.  Why??  Because, they were not “cool”…..they just did not seem to “fit in”…..they weren’t considered worthy or qualified to be in the “in”group…..they were just different and didn’t “seem to have anything going for them”.  Non-Christians are the ones who might try to justify this type of behavior…..but, Christians acting in this way??…..and then justifying it??

This reminds me of a story that we read about recently concerning a large parish with 4,500 families and a church building that could seat 1,500 people.  It was the 10:30 Mass, the place was packed out and from the back of the church in walked an 18 year old hippie.  He had spiked hair in multi colors, had rings hanging all over him, was barefoot and you could smell him from about 10 feet away.  You could just feel the tension building up in the church as he walked down the center aisle looking for a seat…as people wondered where the ushers were in order to get rid of this undesirable.  Not finding a seat, the young man sat down on the floor in front of the pew right before the altar.  You could almost feel what people were thinking…“we came here with our children and grandchildren to worship our Lord Jesus, and we don’t feel that we should have to put up with this riff-raff”.

Suddenly down the center aisle came a senior citizen usher in his three piece suit…tapping along on the tile floor with his cane.  And you could just feel the tension in the church dissipate like air escaping from a large balloon…“thank God we’re going to get some order around here” was the invisible aura that suddenly began to pervade the church.  When the usher arrived up front, with great delight and some pain to his aged and arthritic body, he hung his cane on the back of the pew and struggled to get down on the floor next to the young man, so that he would not feel alone while he attended Mass.  As the pastor got up to give his homily, he said that, based upon what they had just seen and observed, they would probably not remember anything that he had to say.  His only words were for them to go forth and do likewise!!  You could almost feel our Lord touching the hearts of all those present in a very special and meaningful way.

The next concept we want to reflect upon is our willingness as Christians to suffer without the desire to retaliate or to seek revenge or to get even when others hurt us in some way.  Many of us are suffering in our relationships, but for most of us it certainly is not willingly.  Our thinking tends to be “if I were bigger than you, if I had a bigger weapon than you, if I weren’t a woman, or if I had enough money, I’d have the best lawyer in town and you would be toast”, etc.  That’s the problem in most of our relationships; we’re not willing to suffer with one another to the point where our hearts can be healed.  Jesus modeled for us the way in which only suffering love has the ability to transform the human heart and soul, and He asks His disciples to go and do likewise.  The major component of this ability for us to be willing to suffer without getting even has to do with our compassion and forgiveness, topics that we’ll discuss in some detail in a later newsletter. 

This does not mean that if we are being abused in a marital situation that we stay there and get beaten to death physically or mentally.  Sometimes, we need separation for therapy and recovery…sometimes separation for a long time is required…or even separation until death.  But, hopefully such a separation will not result in our being the one to seek a divorce.  The sine qua non (without which there is nothing) of matrimony is its indissolubility.  When a couple comes down the aisle in their marriage ceremony, they are covenanting with God and each other that their love for one another will be a sign to themselves and to the world of God’s unconditional love for us.  And does God divorce us if we become unfaithful, or an alcoholic, or a drug addict, or abusive, or whatever??…of course not…and He asks us to be willing to do the same with one another.  Now, maybe we can’t live with the person any longer, and in those situations, our healing over time is so desperately needed.

This is a most difficult area in our so very human lives, and many of us have suffered and been very wounded in the past in our domestic lives, and we’ve always done the best we knew how with what we had at the time.  And God wants us to know how much He loves us just as we are, and how He wants us now to be able to properly prepare our children and grandchildren for this most precious sacrament.  More to come.

Please pray for us each day, as we do for you and your precious family and loved ones, and please help us financially especially now in whatever amount you may feel that God is calling you to give to be of assistance to us.

In God’s peace and joy,

Brian & Peggy Casey