Preparing for Confirmation

This Thursday Bishop Kieran will be coming to Horsham to say Mass and to seal our Confirmation candidates with the Spirit. Usually this happens over the course of a few weekends at Worth Abbey but since we have so many this year our lovely bishop is coming to us instead! This is an exciting time for the parish but most especially for the candidates themselves and their families. Please, please pray for all of them as they prepare to receive this wonderful sacrament on Thursday evening. It will be a wonderful, beautiful and inspiring thing to watch them enter event deeper into their relationship with God.

Preparing for Confirmation

This evening at Mass the parish watched and thoroughly enjoyed the chance to see our full-to-the-brim class of Confirmation candidates take part in their formal enrollment. First Fr. Aaron asked them of their commitment, were they ready to take this next step, did they understand it and would they joyfully live and embrace it. (To which they all, of course, answered, "we do.") Then to the parents he reminded them of the commitment they had made to raise their children in the practice of the faith at their baptism, asking would they continue to support and encourage them along this new and exciting step (again a resounding, "we do"). And finally to the parish community he asked if we too would support and pray for each one of these candidates both now and in the future (a very hearty "we do" there too!)

Seeing the candidates taking on their faith, making it their own, wanting to have a deeper, more personal, more intimate relationship with Christ as they mature into adulthood was very moving (even if they were a little nervous standing on the Sanctuary with everyone a-watching) and a powerful reminder to the rest of us that our Catholic faith is not something we should take for granted. It is vibrant, it is always relevant, always personal and a constant journey in which we are called to give ourselves more and more to God. Very cool stuff, eh?

Please, please, please pray for the candidates, their families, their sponsors and catechists as they prepare for this wonderful sacrament in May.