🌟✨ Get ready for an unforgettable adventure! 🎉 Join the Diocese of Shreveport on the incredible **2025 Jubilee of Youth: Italy Pilgrimage** with Canterbury Pilgrimages! 🇮🇹✝️ Explore the beauty of Italy, deepen your faith, and create lasting memories with friends from around the world! 🙌 Don’t miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime experience!
#JubileeOfYouth #ItalyPilgrimage #FaithAndFriendship 💖🌍
... See MoreSee Less
0 CommentsComment on Facebook
🎉 Big things are happening this November at Mary Queen of Peace Church! 📅 Join us for a month filled with uplifting events, community gatherings, and opportunities for growth in faith. Whether you’re looking to connect with others or deepen your spirituality, there’s something for everyone! 🙏✨ Save the dates and stay tuned for more details!
#MQPEvents #CommunitySpirit #FaithJourney
... See MoreSee Less
0 CommentsComment on Facebook
🎉 Congratulations to the winners of our Pastoral Council Elections held this past weekend! 🎉 Join us in welcoming Bill Shelton, Pedro Mudafort, and Mary Simon to their new roles. We're excited to see the positive impact their leadership will bring to our community! 🙌 #communityleaders #NewBeginnings #TogetherInFaith
📞Please call the Church Office at (318) 752-5971 for more information.
... See MoreSee Less
12 CommentsComment on Facebook
Congratulations🎉🎉🎉 I know all three of you will do an awesome job!
congrats!
Congratulations!!!
Cast all your anxiety on Him because he cares for you.
#MaryQueenOfPeaceBossier #peace
Click the link 👉 www.mqop.com/welcome.html
... See MoreSee Less
0 CommentsComment on Facebook
🕊️Sunday, November 03, 2024
#Homily by Father Karl Daigle
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B-2024
🥖Bread for the Journey
In their hit song “I Want To Know What Love Is,” the band Foreigner sings, “I wanna know what love is. I want you to show me. I wanna feel what love is. I know you can show me.” As a people of faith, we believe that Jesus Christ, who is God in the flesh, is the One who “shows us” how to truly love in a manner that is pleasing to God. He revealed authentic love through His teachings and earthly ministry, especially through how he loved and served people, and His sacrificial death on the cross.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls us to a love that encompasses our whole being. We are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. In other words, we are to love Him completely and without reservation. This is not meant to be flowery language but a way of life. We get a taste of what it means to love Him with our whole being through the people, things, and activities that mean the most to us. For example, What consumes our time and attention? What do we long for? What do we enjoy? How do we spend our leisure time? What enlivens us and provides us with a sense of passion, purpose, and devotion? The one thing in my life that clearly illustrates how I am to love God above all else is my fandom for the Pittsburgh Steelers. I think about them in season and out of season. I go online to check the latest Steelers news several times a day. I have laser focus during games. I am totally into them. In my living room, I have several collages of my favorite players. In my office, I have Superbowl posters. I think about them all the time. I am called to have the same passion and devotion for God, with the exception that God is my First Love.
Although we love God, there is a tendency for us to have a divided heart. God is often one love among many other loves in our lives. It is quite possible He is not even at the top of the list. Where does he rank for us? And why? Is He our numero uno?
God is the ultimate realist. He knows that we are incapable of loving Him with our whole being all by ourselves. At the same time, He would not require it of us if He was not willing to personally assist us. God helps us by loving us first. In the first letter of John(4:19), the sacred writer states: “We love because God first loved us.” God is the source of our love for Him. In the very act of our creation, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit we receive in Baptism and Confirmation, our whole being is totally infused with the love of God. In other words, we are completely “soaked” and “saturated” in His love, whether we realize it or not. The love of God, that dwells within us, is the love with which we are able to love Him fully in return. The first step is to recognize and embrace that love, that already lies within.
Loving God with all of our being begins from our hearts. From the biblical perspective, the heart is understood in a spiritual sense, not a physical or biological one. The heart is the seat of our thoughts, feelings, decisions, and conscience. In his second letter to the Corinthians(3:15-16), St. Paul writes: “A veil lies on their heart, but whenever their heart turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” We place a veil between our hearts and the heart of God, whenever set it on sin, selfish preoccupations, and worldly pleasures that are either not pleasing to God or that we place ahead of Him.
However, the more we allow God to be our First Love, the more the veil is lifted and with heightened spiritual and moral sensibilities, we see and celebrate God’s beauty, wisdom, grandeur, and virtues. At any given moment, we can lift the veil over our hearts towards God through talking to him, simple awareness, seeking His mercy, and immersing ourselves in His Word or other sound spiritual and religious reading.
Jesus calls us to love God with our all of our souls. The soul is the largest part of the heart that is composed of our mind, emotions, and will. Our souls were created to express the glory of God. Due to our wounded human nature, we have to fight the temptation to glorify ourselves through our opinions, feelings, and decisions that are independent from God and His will.
As we turn our souls to God, our love grows as He infuses more of Himself into us. As a result, “His thoughts become our thoughts.” “His feelings become our feelings.” “His decisions become our decisions.” As we allow the love of God to grow in our souls, we spontaneously glorify God and seek to make His love flesh for those around us. Hopefully they will see, sense, and be blessed. They may even be inspired to love God with their whole soul.
Jesus calls us to love God with all of our minds. Our mind is the leading part of our soul. It directs the rest of our being, and it influences those things that we love and the decisions that we make. Our minds can be set on many things. We are called to single minded in our devotion to God. We can do that in two important ways. First, we seek to do everything for the glory of God, so our lives in effect, become one, unceasing prayer. Second, we seek to live in the Spirit and not the flesh.
Whenever we focus our minds on things of the spirit, our inner vitality and inner peace reaches new heights and depths. Whenever we set it on things of the flesh, we experience the opposite. St. Ignatius of Loyola experienced this reality firsthand while recovering from a serious, leg injury. He noticed that whenever he reflected on achieving fame and glory on the battlefield or winning the love of a certain lady on the Spanish noble court, he experienced conflicting emotions. At first, he experienced pleasure and excitement, but eventually it left him feeling restless and unsatisfied. On the other hand, when he reflected on the lives of the saints, he was inspired by their love for God and commitment to virtue holiness of life. This left him peaceful and satisfied. Such is the power of focusing on the right things.
Jesus calls us to love God with all of our strength. This involves the physical strength of our body, more specifically, how we use our time and energy. As we allow God to fill our hearts and souls to overflowing with His love, we will notice a change in our attitude and priorities. We will experience a growing interest in focusing more of our time and energy on cultivating and deepening our relationship with Jesus Christ and serving His people. We will experience an increased desire and commitment for holiness of life.
Loving God with our whole being is a moment by moment, daily, reality. As our hunger and thirst to receive and experience the love of God becomes more insatiable, these sentiments from Foreigner become our very own: “I want to know what love is. (Love that you feel inside) I want you to show me. (I’m feeling so much love) I wanna feel what love is. (And you know, you just can’t hide) I know you can show me.”
Jesus Christ can show each of us how to love God with all of our being, if only we allow Him to take us spiritually by hand and shepherd us through our earthly journey into our heavenly homeland, which is our ultimate paradise.
#MaryQueenOfPeace 📞Please call the Church Office at (318) 752-5971 for more information.
... See MoreSee Less
0 CommentsComment on Facebook
🕊️All Saints' Day, November 01, 2024
#Homily by Father Karl Daigle
🥖Bread for the Journey
Today, we celebrate the lives of the saints. As we call to mind the people of every age and walk of life, that have “fought the good fight, kept the faith, and won the race,” I am reminded of a watershed moment in my own spiritual journey. It changed my understanding of the call to holiness. I was in graduate seminary at Notre Dame in New Orleans. Msgr. Franz Graef, a priest professor, who also happened to a priest of the Diocese of Shreveport, approached me one day. He shared his observation that I came across like my faith and relationship with God was a joyless burden. I was deeply hurt and offended by his comment. I felt like he had not earned the right to challenge me in such a bold and intimate manner. We did not really know each other well on a personal level, and he was not my Confessor or Spiritual Director. When my pride eventually subsided, I humbly recognized he had been a prophetic voice in my life. His words pierced my heart. They were so true, and they were from God. They became a seed that would eventually bear abundant fruit in my heart, personal life, and priestly ministry.
They led me to embark on the journey of discovering “why” I experienced my faith and relationship with God as a joyless burden. I learned that the main underlying issue was an “image of God” problem, on multiple levels. First, I had not yet discovered that God desired a daily, personal relationship with me. Up until this point, I thought a relationship with God mainly consisted of faithfully praying my structured prayers and devotions. At first, that was enough, but after a while, it left me struggling to feel connected to God and questioning whether this was all there was to a relationship with Him.
Through His grace, I learned that as our relationship with Him evolves, the usual movement of the Holy Spirit is from more structure to personal, formal to informal, quantity to quality, talking to listening, thinking to savoring His presence in faith. It is not an either/or thing. It is a both/and reality. At the same time, the overall movement in our relationship with God is a growing personalism, receptivity, and an intentional attentiveness to God. This growing knowledge and experience, set my soul on fire for God because it was relational, dynamic, and mutual. I was also inspired when I learned that my whole day and life could become a prayer by offering myself to God and striving to do everything out of love for Him.
Second, my image of God problem also manifested itself in how I felt God viewed and dealt with me. I believed that God was obsessively focused on my sins. As a result, I was usually negatively preoccupied with what “I had done,” and what “I had failed to do.” Even though it is a blessing to have a strong conscience and a desire for holiness, if not properly understood, you can drive yourself and other people crazy. Amid our sinfulness and imperfections, God sees our hearts and all the efforts we make to “be” better and “do” better, with the help of His grace. He celebrates our efforts and the “baby steps” we make toward being more like Him and doing His will. In fact, God considers certain things as sinful precisely because it hurts us and other people, personally and spiritually. Declaring something as sinful is a revelation of God’s caring and protective love.
A wise spiritual person once proclaimed, “God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.” It is our awareness that God loves us, even in our imperfections, that is meant to be the catalyst for our ongoing personal and spiritual growth and transformation. One important lesson I have learned is that it is highly counterproductive to simply obsess about our sins, especially if it is a sin that is more habitual or addictive in nature. It can drag us down a rabbit hole of discouragement and hopelessness. The best thing we can do is to quickly ask God to forgive us and to help us through the power of His grace. Our focus ideally becomes developing a faithful and consistent daily prayer life. As we are faithful to prayer, day after day, month after month, and year after year, we grow in spiritual and moral strength and endurance, as we allow ourselves to be continually fortified by the Spirit of God. We eventually become strong enough to resist the sin, or we even lose our desire for it. If we happen to fall, we are quick to humble ourselves before the Lord in a spirit of trust. Our spiritual and moral transformation is ultimately a work of God’s grace with our ongoing consent.
Finally, my image of God problem manifested itself by separating my relationship with God from the rest of my life and humanity. I felt that to be holy and pleasing to God, I always needed to be praying to God, in church, reading about Him, thinking about Him, or talking about Him. If not, I was not at peace. I was overly spiritual in an unbalanced manner.
Thankfully, I learned that He is connected to every aspect of our daily lives and that we can grow closer to Him in the most ordinary and seemingly non-spiritual ways. I would like to drive this point home by sharing the story of Ken Stabler. He was a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Oakland Raiders. During his playing days and for some time thereafter, he had quite the reputation of being a wild party animal and a lover of all women. Towards the end of his life, he become more introspective and came to belief in, and value, a relationship with God. He affectionately referred to God as the “Big Guy,” and expressed his belief that a relationship with Him was about awareness.
Ken hit the nail on the head. It is an awareness about how God is present and active in our lives, in and through everyone, everything, and every situation, if only we have the spiritual eyes to see. We can draw closer to God through our awareness of Him while interacting with other people, engaging in work or in various activities and hobbies, listening to an inspirational song, watching a captivating movie, or savoring the beauty of His creation.
Awareness is a beautiful and necessary form of prayer and an important way of entering into a deeper communion with God. By habitually practicing our awareness of God, we begin to connect Him to every moment and dimension of our lives, as we seek to live it out for His glory and honor. Our eyes are opened to the beautiful epiphany that “heaven and earth are filled with His glory,” and that we are able “to love Him in all things and above all things.” God reveals Himself and seeks to draw us closer to Himself through all that He has made. All is sacred, if viewed and embraced in the right frame of mind and heart, and it is in union with the revealed will of God.
The early Church Father, St, Irenaeus, proclaimed: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” We are most fully alive to the degree we are in Christ and have the spiritual awareness to recognize how we can encounter him and grow closer to Him through our graced humanity in the context of daily living.
Several years after I became a priest, Msgr. Franz Graef approached me after a Diocesan event and remarked that I seemed so joyful and full of life. I was quick to let him know that several years prior, he had planted a seed within my soul, that powerfully healed and transformed my relationship with God. I realized he knew what I was talking about because a huge smile fully enveloped his face at that very moment. Msgr. Franz Graef left this world in 2016. As he helped me to better discover what it means to find joy in the Lord and to be fully alive in Christ, may he now experience that in its everlasting fullness.
The fundamental issue in having an intimate and lifegiving union with God, involves a healthy and truthful image of Him. By embracing one, being united with Christ, and being a living saint, is supposed to make us the most joyful and alive people in the world. Are we? If not, what can we do about it? As St. Paul reminds us, “God is for us, not against us.” Believing that makes all the difference.
#MaryQueenOfPeace 📞Please call the Church Office at (318) 752-5971 for more information.
... See MoreSee Less
0 CommentsComment on Facebook