Dear Friends in Christ,

As I have mentioned before in previous bulletin letters over the years, this time of year as we enter into Autumn is my favorite time of year. Not only do I enjoy the dramatic changing of colors on the trees, or the crisp air in the mornings, but the Fall brings back many memories for me of the good memories of harvesting grapes and turning them into wine. The process of gathering the grapes, transporting them to the wine cellar, and crushing them into a vat for fermentation was an experience that taught me much about the spiritual life. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (Jn. 12:24)



When I witnessed the process of processing grapes during harvest, I realized how fitting God uses bread and wine in the Eucharist: in order to make bread or wine, something (in these cases, wheat and grapes) has to die. When we harvested the grapes, we would load them either into the press or the de-stemmer in order to begin the fermentation process. In both cases, the grapes would give up their integrity in order for their juice to be extracted and turned into wine through the fermentation process. In a very real way, the process of wine-making gave me a preliminary understanding of the reality of death.

At this time during the Liturgical Year, we are invited to ponder the reality of the Four Last Things, namely, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. Next weekend, we will have the opportunity to celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints when we will rejoice for those who are united to God in Heaven, and then the following day we will commemorate All Souls when we will pray for the eternal rest of the souls in Purgatory. For many of us, perhaps it makes us feel uncomfortable to think about these realities. This is natural, since we have a natural tendency to avoid physical death and preserve our lives. However, because our Faith teaches us that God has the power over life and death, we can face these uncomfortable truths with the confidence that God will provide for us in the end.

Unfortunately, in our culture, we see that there are two extremes we can tend towards when it comes to death. On the one hand, we do everything we can to avoid thinking about death by removing ourselves from it as much as possible. We often can fall into the trap of thinking that we will live forever here on earth, and we do everything we can to avoid old-age or the effects of death in our lives.

On the other hand, we can also fall into the trap of having an over-fascination with death that is unhealthy for our spiritual lives. As we look around at this time of year, there is no shortage of evidence that our culture delights in death to the point where we celebrate its effect to scare others in a dramatic way. Unfortunately, this unhealthy attachment to death can feed our souls to think it acceptable to give into nihilism, the philosophy that there is no point to human life and that death is the ultimate end of our lives. As Christians, we know that death does not win, and that we are destined to enjoy eternal life with God in Heaven.

In closing, I wish to encourage all of us to enter into this season of Autumn with a renewed outlook on the reality of death, and a keen desire for eternal life. As the falling leaves remind us that we will have to face death, we know that God promises us a resurrected life with him if we remain faithful to Him through a life of prayer and the Sacraments.

May Christ’s peace be with you,

Fr. Briggs