Owatonna is its own weird wacky world.  I am convinced that there is some Midwestern small town secret order of society that requires a password.  Or at least a graduation party.    In June, for basically a month, the world stops spinning and we all congregate in garages and back yards to celebrate our graduates.  I have never seen anything like it.  If you talk to anyone who is from outside Owatonna, they will agree with you.  No one does…

What is initiation?  According to the dictionary initiation means a “ceremony…. by which somebody is admitted to a group, organization, or religion.”  In our Catholic Faith we have three sacraments of initiation—Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion.  They are the three primary sacraments, on which the rest of our life as a Christian depends. In the early church they were tied very closely together, but now the three sacraments are celebrated at different milestones in our spiritual lives.   This weekend at…

 A Sense of the Season First, we kept the forty days, with praying, fasting and giving alms. Then we celebrated the three days of Christ’s passion, dying and rising. Now we delight in the fifty days, with rejoicing, feasting and giving witness! The season of Easter is fifty days long. It is a time of unbridled joy, of exuberant rejoicing. The church tells us, “The fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost are celebrated in joyful exultation as one feast day, or better as one ‘great Sunday.’…