Is Our Passion Showing?

It is Wednesday, the week before Passion week - the week we reflect on Jesus' last days -- Jesus' passion. This has always been my frame of mind as we enter into Holy Week with Palm Sunday: trying to be with Jesus in his passion. But the connotation this word brings to my mind has been changing these past weeks as I reflect on this word from another perspective--my own. This is a different departure for me into Holy Week, but as a disciple of Jesus I have to ask myself, "do I walk the walk with Jesus? And if I do, then where is my passion?"

I have been in the process of meeting with pastors, priests, Coordinators of Youth Ministry and lay ecclesial ministers around the diocese, gathering information regarding youth and young adult ministry and the difficulty of susutaining these ministries on many levels.

Specific questions I have been asked lately are these:
Ø What can we do to connect young people to Church?
Ø Why don't young people come to Mass?
Ø Why don't our catholic school youth come to church?
Ø Why don't our young people know about their even when they are confirmed?
Ø How do we help them understand what it means to be Catholic?
Ø Will this way of understanding youth ministry work?
Ø What could we have done differently in dreaming a vision of collaborative youth ministry?
Ø Why aren't things working?
Ø And the big question - "What is missing?"

The question I could not get out of mind was this last one - "what is missing"?

Driving home after this one particular meeting I couldn't help thinking about this question, almost in the form of a mantra-what is missing-what is missing-what is missing? The word passioncame to mind. This is because I had just read an article stating how young people are drawn to adults who have passion about work, about life, about faith, (just about anything!) We all know and understand how much young people are looking for something worthwhile to be passionate about, something worth believing in, possible only through their relationships with people like you and me. This is integral to their life journey: "Adolescence and young adulthood are also life stages when religious conversion is likely to take place."*

Passion shows!-When people have passion for something, it shows. Young people might not perceive us to be passionate about our faith- people who have fallen in love with Jesus Christ and do what he did, speaking the truth as he did, whatever the outcome. If young people do not see us with passion for our faith, then it will be difficult for them to see our faith as something to be passionate about-
So, if they stop coming to our churches, they will continue to seek out passion elsewhere, like a heat seeking missile...

- I hear that they will be handing out passion all next week at a church near you and me - it will cost us, but not in terms of money...

Jesus Christ in Love...

-So let's make an effort to think about "God Love" and go down to the church and get us some passion and fall in love with the me-and the you-and the God-
--and our young people will trip all over themselves to be with us--they will come out of the woodwork to be with us...and together we can change the world...


-Sandy Velasco Scott

* Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 4