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Dear Families,
Happy Pi Day (3.14) to each of you! Today, students, led by our 8th graders, at the direction of Ms. Savio, taught their Family Groups all about 𝞹! Through scavenger hunts, games and interactive opportunities, all of our K-8 students had an opportunity to learn something new, and grow together! Thank you for your leadership, 8th graders and Ms. Savio! Want to know a little more about the most infamous irrational number of all, 𝞹 ? Check out the video, shared here from PBS Kids to learn a little more about Pi!
Congrats also to our Pi Recital Champs in middle school: 1st place: Lena, 7th grade -89 digits, 2nd place: Frankie, 6th grade -70 digits, 3rd place: Eli, 6th grade -50 digits and Other participants: Kellen, AJ, Emmett, and Evi!
Quick Announcements before my Lenten reflection for the week:
- Re-enrollment closes tomorrow. See below.
- Auction Updates!!! See below! All I can say is WOW!!! AWESOME!
- Tomorrow is Green Spirit Day in honor of St. Patrick’s Day on Sunday.
- Saturday night is St. Patrick’s Day (Eve) Community Dinner with Holy Rosary! Please join us as we celebrate this festive day, and join as a new Parish Family. See more below.
- Check out the many important announcements below.
And now for another Lenten Reflection:
On this Pi Day, I spent my day at a Principal Meeting with other leaders in the Archdiocese. Beginning our day with Mass, I found myself thinking about other things, besides Pi, that are irrational. Countless things in our world do not make sense, and yet often we find ourselves believing anyway. For some people, believing in God is irrational. “How can you believe in something you cannot see? Touch? Hear?” For others, not believing in God is equally nonsensical. “How can you believe that you are the end and the beginning? That there is no power higher than your own human existence? How can you not believe in the boundless, unending love He has for each of us?” All people believe in something. All people have doubts. No one is excluded, including Jesus himself. We are a society brimming with people of faith, and people of doubt. On a daily basis, we are engulfed with the complexities and things that leave us in constant quandary and wonder. Things that we believe without seeing, regardless of how unbelievable they may be to someone else, and things that we question; perplexed without clear articulation why things are the way they are. And yet here we are-- together as a society of mixed feelings, beliefs, and relationships. How irrational.
No matter the size of a circle, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter will always be the same (Pi.) For people of faith, no matter what we do, God still loves us. These are irrational things that we know to be true. Facts. So often, things in life are irrational, for good and for bad. Winning the lotto, irrationally awesome. Unexplained loss and heartache, irrationally crushing. They are facts that are true, yes, but sometimes simply do not make sense, aren’t justified. Aren’t fair. And yet, these things exist. They occur, with or without an explanation, even if we feel we are entitled to an answer.
Americans are notorious for wanting to rationalize everything. So the question then is this: How do we sit with the irrational? The unexplained? The unknowns? How do we just “let go and let God”, especially when we don’t want to? Americans, unlike so many other cultures, feel deserving of control. We must have the ability to control a situation, an outcome. We must make sense of all things. In so many ways, this makes us a society of doubt, of laxed faith. We struggle, as a whole, to remember that all things in life are only rational to God, and it is up to us to accept the irrational, the unexplained, the unknowns and leave the certainties to God. It’s beyond our pay grade to have all the answers. We are not God, so why do we even feel entitled to play God? I’m certain there are not many of us who would truly welcome the responsibility that God has.
In this season of Lent, we are reminded to sit in that irrationality of the world around us. Things that we cannot justify, explain, reason or accept. We have to make space to allow God to speak to us through the world and people around us, and guide us in ways to help change the inequities and make the world better. We have to be willing to hear where God is guiding us, as his people, and lean in to the irrationality, with the belief that something more is there-- that there is a purpose for the imperfection. We must let go of the desire for control. There is a purpose for the unexplained, even if it’s not explained to us in the timely fashion we desire. As people of faith, we must find it in our hearts to believe in the no-matter-what-ness. No matter the size of our world, God will continue to call us each by name and love us just the same. His love for us will not change, regardless of the population. There will always be good, there will always be light, there will always be hope, mercy, forgiveness and love; all these things will always exist, even when they don’t make sense.
To believe can so often be irrational. But when we let go of control, we let God step into the driver’s seat of our lives. When we put God at the center, as I have said before, the irrational suddenly finds its place, and if we are lucky, sometimes we are guided to answers in this world, in our time. Faith can be the most perfect and most powerful example of Pi, something irrational and yet perfect, if we allow it to be. Pi beautifully goes on and on forever. It is a mathematical constant. And God’s love for us is the same, if we choose to believe it. Or as George Strait once put it-- it’s “a love without end, Amen.”
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