O God, our Creator, Redeemer Paraclete, in prayer we lift our praise, our blessing, our preaching.
And this opens our Jubilee prayer, as a Dominican this first and opening line lifts our heart, our gaze, our life, our soul and our very being to God the very source, purpose, and destination of our existence. As we begin this season of preparedness let us unite at the table of Saint Dominic and recommit ourselves to the service of our Saviour under the cappa of Saint Dominic, to praise, to bless and to preach.
We hope that this message finds you well, we know many of us have and are suffering. Our sincerest and heartfelt love goes to all who have been ill or who have lost loved ones in these horrible times. We pray this lent maybe be used as a plea to our Lord to send His Spirit and give us deliverance from Covid 19. For too long now this pestilence has clouded us, has indeed locked many of us from the joy of receiving the very gift of Himself that our Saviour, in His benevolence has bestowed upon us. We like many of you look forward to perhaps later in the year being able to move a bit more freely but more importantly returning to the sacraments.
Like many of you, we have been blessed to have had access to the many offerings of Mass and services that our brothers the friars have been so joyfully sharing with us on some of the social media channels. We are aware that during lent this year there will be many more such offerings and encourage you to access them, be it on YouTube, Facebook, or the other outlets.
Several of you have already signed up to our platform “ECLDF Agora” and although in it is in its infancy, it is organic and will grow to be an excellent resource, where we can all learn, educate, share and most importantly interact with and from each other. Again we encourage you to sign up and make use of the platform.
Ludovic has been extremely busy commissioning Agora and has been ably assisted by our webmaster Karin Bornhijm (thank you Karin) in relaunching the ECLDF website.
We are in the process of reigniting plans for our assembly which please God will take place in 2022. We are provisionally looking at it being convened around the weekend of August 12th – 17th 2022, with Vilija and her team back in play to deliver what we believe will be a blessed gathering.
During lent we will share a Sunday reflection each week, it would be great if you could share what you have been doing and what you are up to in your fraternities and chapters over the past year. We would be really delighted if you could let us know of any plans that you have for the Jubilee and how you plan to celebrate.
The Master in a recent interview explains the theme of the Jubilee year which is titled Europe is a mission territory and reminds us of our shared responsibility to “if we want to spread the Gospel in our secularized world, we have to be in the midst of the people.” We have brothers and sisters, spoken many times of the unique role we as lay members of our order have, we are the people, we are in that midst that the Master refers to. As Pope Emeritus Benedict reiterates our Church is a missionary church, Europe is as the Master says “mission territory”, so what are we waiting for? We as Dominicans around St Dominic’s table must take up the torch and share “the good news of Jesus Christ” with the people we live among. In this jubilee year, particularly during this lent let us all recommit to our communion, our Church’s mission, to share in every way we can in the Salvific mission Jesus has shared with us.
You are always in our prayers, please keep safe, stay healthy and with Gods grace we can meet in the not-too-distant future.
With lots of love
your ECLDF
Damien, Felix, Gabriel, Ludovic, Maro, Vilija.
Crédits photo : nambitomo
