Parish Meals are Orthopraxis!
It is important for us to review all our parish family practices from time to time, and a fasting period (such as we are in now) is a good time to review our parish meal practices. Sometimes we acquire bad habits. Such a review helps us to jettison those bad habits. So, going forward at STV:
1. Guests should ALWAYS be first. Always. And there is never a time that always is not. Before clergy. Before everyone. Before anyone. Guests always go first. We need to work on this as a parish family, so please support those who forget in a loving way. This especially includes kids. It is important spiritually for us all to learn to delay our gratification, and perhaps most important for the kids to do that. We are asking for folks to wait for 1 or 2 minutes to allow guests to go first. This is a good spiritual challenge for us. Let us support each other in this regard with Christian love!
2. Meals will no longer be self service beginning Sunday, December 4. It turns out that people throw a lot of food away every Sunday, and this is completely unacceptable from an Orthodox point of view. We can not waste the Lord’s blessing. And we need to teach our children this. If they learn to waste food at church we are teaching them the OPPOSITE of what they should do as mature Orthodox Christians. By letting people take as much food as they like much of it is thrown away, and often there is not enough for those who are at the end of the line.
3. Donation for lunch: you may not have $10 for weekly lunch or $20 for Building Fund Dinner (once per month), but you probably have something you can give. Many people have gotten into the habit of eating without giving any donation at all, and this is not fair to those ladies who work so hard to prepare a meal for everyone. Yes – we have the Christian duty to be hospitable. That is unquestionably true and this will not change. But our meals also support our parish and our many ministries. The Building Fund Dinner supports the Building Fund, as you might imagine. :) These things are not unimportant. The Lord’s knows our hearts – we aren’t going to interrogate anyone. You need to be right with the Lord in this regard, and we leave it to your conscience to put in the box what you can, and if you can’t, then to put in nothing and ask the Lord’s blessings on those who provided the meal.
Asking Your Prayers,
Fr. Gregory
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