Brief Christmas Recap

This is the final week of the Christmas season. The Christmas season. It’s good to be reminded of the fact that Christmas is more than a single day. On Christmas Day, December 25th, I celebrated the morning Mass at St. Anthony of Padua Church, one of our Dominican Churches in New Orleans. After dinner with the community and some local friends, I got on a flight and arrived at my parent’s house in Oklahoma City where I spent the next few days. From December 30 to January 3, I was in Phoenix, Arizona for SLS20, the FOCUS conference attended by more than 8000 college students from around the country.

The first FOCUS conference I attended was SEEK 2015 in Nashville. I was a transitional deacon and helped our Vocations Director at the table. I have always enjoyed these conferences, and a special treat at SLS20 was the fact that we celebrated the New Year with thousands of other Catholics.

My purpose for being at SLS20 was to represent the Dominican Friars in the Religious Vocations area. As someone else put it, we’re “following the Holy Spirit by being at the right place at the right time.”

In my many conversations with young men during the course of the week. I can definitely say that what they are looking for is what I was looking for in 2009 when I joined the Dominicans — to follow Christ no matter the cost. When a young man talks to me and asks what it’s like being a Dominican friar in the Southern US, the one-word answer is ‘exciting.’ The South is fertile ground for the Dominican mission of preaching the Gospel for the salvation of souls. But it’s also a region in need of good preaching, the Church is growing in the Southern US and we are truly blessed to be here and to be a part of that growth. Stay tuned, in the weeks to come I’ll have more about the growing Church in the Southern US.