From the Pastor's Desk - September 20, 2026

Dear St. Martin’s Parishioners,

While out with a couple of priests this past week, we struck up a conversation with a gentleman we happened to meet. At one point he asked us what we did for a living, and we responded that we were priests. After the initial surprise, he disclosed that he was Catholic and, as a boy, served at Mass every day. Then, when he was sixteen years old, he stopped practicing and hasn’t been back to church since. He is now sixty-seven years old. As we conversed, he opened up that his childhood was miserable. Both of his parents were Marines, and unfortunately, they raised their children with strict discipline and no love. He didn’t say as much, but it struck me that his image of God was that of a strict disciplinarian, impossible to please, harsh, and focused on us following his rules to appease him. It’s only natural that the image of God that we develop in infancy is associated with our relationship with our parents. Is it any surprise that he stopped practicing his faith in his teenage years? Sometimes we never bridge the gap between our instinctual image of God and what we are taught about him through Scripture and Church teaching.

Some of the most important spiritual work that we have to do is to correct our image of God. Because of original sin and our fallen human nature, our “God image” needs some degree of correction. Some people instinctively feel God to be harsh and demanding; for others, he is distant and rather unconcerned about us. Some people sense that God is waiting to shame us or that he is conditional with his love. Jesus came to reveal the Father to us, and he says in John’s gospel, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn. 17:3) The gift of the Holy Spirit allows us to bridge the gap between our instinctual, insufficient God image, and truth of who our Heavenly Father is. The Holy Spirit makes us beloved sons and daughters of the Father and pours forth God’s love into our hearts. One of books I’ve found to be most helpful in this process of healing our God image is, Abba’s Heart, by Neil Lozano. Lozano argues that God’s desire for us is to feel in the very marrow of our bones that we are his beloved sons and daughters. Let us be about that work, because there are countless people in our world who need our witness of the truth of God’s love.

In Christ,

Fr. Dave