2015
Director of Worship and Music
We are pleased to announce we are seeking a full-time Director of Worship and Music! If you are interested in joining our dynamic parish staff and have a passion for liturgy, visit Serve At Our Church for details and how to apply and for this and other opportunities at our parish.
2015
Weekly Bulletin for April 26, 2015
We still have Student Study Days in the Parish April 26-28 this upcoming week! Check out the bulletin for summer opportunities at our parish to grow in your faith. Make sure to note the summer schedule for the parish office hours and mass times!
2015
Undergrad Summer Program
Staying in the Ann Arbor area for the summer? Looking for something to do in a faith-based community?
Look no further than the Undergrad Summer Program at St. Mary Student Parish.We will be meeting twice a week during the summer: Tuesday nights will be an SCC, a chance to share your faith with other students, and Thursday nights will be a variety of activities like game nights, going out to eat, or watching a movie together.
Fill out the online form to get onto our summer email list!
2015
Weekly Bulletin for April 19, 2015
Join us at St. Mary’s Student Parish for the last ig.nite this Thursday evening! We also have many activities for students during the last week of classes and exams including the Last Class Talent Bash and Student Study Days! Our 2015 graduates are invited to a baccalaureate mass and reception to celebrate their graduations on Friday, May 1st at 5:10pm. Pray for our students taking exams and graduating in these upcoming weeks!
2015
Weekly Bulletin for April 12, 2015
Make sure to check out all the student activities that are rapidly approaching as the winter semester at the University of Michigan comes to an end. Last Class Talent Bash on April 21st, Square Dancing on April 17th, and St. Mary Student Parish Study Days April 19th-28th! Our parish is also taking initiative in serving the Ann Arbor community through various hunger projects sponsored by our social justice ministry.
2015
Rejoice and Be Glad!
Written by Fr. Ben Hawley, SJ on Easter Sunday
Living a human life is harder than it looks. Young people have the great advantages of youth, idealism, energy, courage, and a sense that no mountain too high, no challenge too great, no barrier too obstructing. As we live, strive and struggle, we can sometimes find that in fact our lives can seem increasingly difficult and even impossible to navigate – friends, family, work, politics, and economics not fulfilling our needs or desires as we had hoped. At this point our Catholic faith, in particular, Jesus’ Resurrection from sin and death, reminds us that God knows our needs, and our ongoing reflection on our experience shows us that God is already acting to help us. God simply asks us to say Yes to God’s invitation to help us.
But is God big enough to handle the challenges we face, and is God’s guidance enough to enrich our lives beyond what we can achieve on our own? These are essential questions. Following Jesus through his public ministry in the gospel readings in Ordinary Time, we are invited to hear the message that, Yes, God’s presence gives us a richness of life we cannot achieve for ourselves. Following Jesus through his Lenten journey to his destiny in Jerusalem, which we relive moment by moment in the Triduum, we are invited to experience the reality that, Yes, God’s action can lift us through life’s challenges, privations, and hardships to a better life beyond – both in this life and in the afterlife.
In other words, in the celebrations of the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday we come to experience the reality that God’s life breaks through death, God’s love breaks through opposition or heartache, and that our lives of faith gather their substance from the reality of God’s existence and active pursuit of us. So, I invite you not only into the celebration of this great day but also in the following eight days – the Octave of Easter – and then into the remainder of the Easter Season – up to Pentecost Sunday, May 24 this year. In God’s world there is always more joy than sorrow, more Easter than Lent. Let us all rejoice and be glad.
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Fr. Benjamin Hawley, SJ
Fr. Ben has served as Pastor and Director of Catholic Campus Ministry since August 2010. As pastor his ministry focus is helping the parish be “the field hospital for the wounded,” per Pope Francis, where people discover Jesus’ liberation and healing. Following his ordination in June 2000 Fr. Ben served as President of Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School of Indianapolis until 2006. Prior to becoming Catholic in 1988, Fr. Ben worked for the Agency for International Development, the foreign assistance program of the US Government.
Email: pastorstmarys@gmail.com
2015
Weeky Bulletin for April 5, 2015
Easter is here! Come to the Mass for Recovery on April 9 at 7:30pm. Check out the Student’s Square Dance on Friday, April 17th and be sure to check the dates and times for our Student Study Days prior to exams!
2015
God Sure is Good
Written by Davis Argersinger on Holy Saturday
Throughout much of my life, I never quite understood the relationship I had with God. I attended Christmas Eve and Easter services with my family at St. Andrews Episcopal Church, but I didn’t spend much time in church outside of those two dates. I knew God was somehow present in my life, but I had no formal way of growing closer to Him. That all changed though when I started dating my girlfriend Molly, whose passionate Catholic faith helped me understand that God was in fact working through her to lead me to the Catholic Church. She was, and is, a continuous example to me of how great life can be when lived with an unending appreciation of God’s grace. Towards the end of my senior year in high school, I had decided that I wanted to join the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) program at St. Mary’s. God had so graciously blessed me with the desire to become Catholic.
I soon realized that God’s blessings during my RCIA faith journey were only beginning to rain down upon me. My loving mom, Sarah, whose desire for faith was so similar to mine, had decided to join RCIA with me. Beginning our journeys together towards closeness to God, side-by-side, will always be one of the greatest blessings of my life. As RCIA I had begun, I was blessed with the fellowship of my sponsor Bart, whose enduring and enthusiastic Catholic faith I could only hope to someday parallel. I was provided with so much love and support. God sure is good.
As I reflect back on my first year in the Catholic Church, I have trouble expressing the thankfulness I have for God, and for all of His children who have helped me seek His closeness. As found in the readings for tonight’s Easter Vigil, “God indeed is my savior; I am confident and unafraid. My strength and my courage is the LORD, and he has been my savior” (IS 12:2-3).
Let us always prayerfully thank God for the wonderful desire He has given us to be Catholic.
Question for Reflection & Suggestion for Prayer:
In thinking about your Lenten journey, in what areas of your life do you desire further closeness to God?
Always thank God for the day that stands ahead of you.
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Davis Argersinger
Davis is a sophomore premedical student majoring in psychology at the University of Michigan. He entered the Catholic Church through St. Mary’s RCIA Program in 2014. Davis is incredibly thankful for the support that St. Mary Student Parish has given him during his first year as a Catholic.
Email: davisarg@umich.edu
2015
Take the Risk
Written by Abby Braun on Good Friday
“ My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch.” –Mark 14:34
I didn’t answer the first time the phone rang. It was 11:00 p.m. on a weeknight and I was getting ready for bed, so I let my friend Sara’s call go to voice mail. When she called again two minutes later, I knew it was important so I picked up. Sara had just learned that her dad, who was in the middle of what was supposed to be a relatively minor heart surgery, was probably going to die before we saw the sun rise again. She called to ask for my prayers and also to ask for something more tangible of me. Would I travel home to Philadelphia with her (we were both living in St. Louis at the time) and spend the week with her and her family as they walked the difficult road of burying her dad?
I often think about that week that I spent with my friend Sara. Sitting in the funeral home for hours while people filed through to pay their respects and say goodbyes. Standing in the cemetery on a crisp fall day, holding my friend’s hand. Lots of tears and laughter and meals and stories shared. It was a week of profound grace for me. Sara asked me to go with her because my own father died when I was in high school, so she knew I understood something about what her heart needed without having to say anything.
Certainly that was part of the grace of that week for me, that I was able to offer love and my simple presence in a way that was helpful to her and her family, because I had been there. But the other grace – the one that has stayed with me even more – was the fact that my friend took the risk to invite me into one of the most sacred, most painful, most vulnerable moments of her life. It was an act of courage on her part, to ask so much of me. And in the end, that act of courage and vulnerability was remarkably transformative for us both: our lives and our friendship were blessed and enriched beyond measure because of it.
That week is on my mind in a particular way as we keep watch this Good Friday and walk with Jesus through his own suffering, death, and burial. I have often been inspired by the witness of the disciples who stay with Jesus to the bitter end, when all hope seems lost. But as I heard the Passion story last Sunday, with ears fresh from having fumbled through another Lent, what hit my heart most was the image of Jesus in the garden, admitting to his friends that he is sad and afraid, asking them to stay with him. How vulnerable he must have been, admitting this to the ones he had been leading, asking them to give what he knew they could not give. And yet that did not stop him from taking the risk to be fully human and to share his whole self.
All of this leaves me asking myself the question, am I willing to be like Jesus and my friend Sara, to take that same risk, to share my whole self and invite others into my own darkest hours? Am I willing to walk the long road with Jesus, and also to ask him to walk my long road with me? After all, that’s the only way we get to the resurrection. Now is the time, right?
Questions for Reflection:
When have you been invited into a vulnerable place in someone else’s life? How did this experience transform you?
What are the dark places in your own life and your own heart right now? Ask Jesus to enter into those places with you.
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Abby Braun
Abby has served as a campus minister at St. Mary’s since 2012. After studying theology at the University of Notre Dame (BA ’05) and Pastoral Ministry at the University of Dayton (MA ’08), Abby spent four years as a Campus Minister at Saint Louis University where she met her husband, Bob. She is especially grateful to be a part of a Jesuit Parish that serves a University community. Abby works part-time at St. Mary’s and spends the rest of her days at home/toddling around Ann Arbor with her one-year-old daughter, Eleanor.
Email: aabraun@umich.edu
2015
First Things First
Written by Fr. Joseph Wagner, SJ on Holy Thursday
“What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.”
But why? Why could Peter not understand “now” what Jesus was doing by washing his feet? We all understand, don’t we?
I think there is a very good reason that Peter did not understand, and I think it’s the same reason that many of us, many Christians, and far too many preachers don’t understand either. At that moment, Peter had not yet seen what the next 72 hours would reveal. Peter had not yet abandoned Jesus. Peter had not yet felt the pain of loss, the sting of guilt, the utter absence of hope. Peter had not yet seen what he, what the crowds, what the authorities were capable of doing. Most importantly, he had not yet seen what God’s response to it all would be.
In short, he had not yet seen what Love beyond all love looks like. He had not yet seen just how far God was willing to go to convince us of that love. He had not yet seen, not yet felt, not yet accepted—not yet even imagined—how much forgiveness our God is capable of. And because of that, it had not yet changed him. Peter had not yet had his life turned upside-down by love. He could not understand, as his feet were being washed, that the love of Jesus could become—if he accepted it—the same love that could flow through him. He could not yet understand that only by allowing love to change him could he become the means by which love would change others, transforming their lives, healing broken hearts, feeding the hungry, forgiving enemies.
But not yet. It couldn’t happen yet for Peter, as it cannot happen for any of us until we allow God’s love to transform us. Until we accept it—until we place our faith in it in a way that makes a difference—until then, any call to us to wash each other’s feet will seem only like a nice gesture, like an empty task, like an intrusive burden.
Questions for Reflection:
Does the call to live your Christian identity feel like a burden or flow out of love?
Love cannot flow through you unless it first flows into you. Are you willing to let God’s love for you transform your life?
*Image (above): The Washing of the Feet by Ghislaine Howard (2004)
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Fr. Joseph F. Wagner, SJ
Fr. Joe is a Jesuit priest and Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He is currently enjoying a research sabbatical in Ann Arbor, and enjoying even more all those he has met at St. Mary Student Parish.
Email: jwagner@smspnewman.org