Meet Will Reaves

Hello! My name is Will Reaves, and it is my honor to join your parish community as Director of Faith Formation and Intergenerational Catechesis. While I am not a native of Pittsburgh, I have spent the last six and a half years as Director of Evangelization at St. Catherine of Sweden/Sts. Martha and Mary Parish. Over the years I have come to appreciate all the many blessings that Southwestern Pennsylvania has over my native California: snow storms, ticks, and tight roads up steep hills.

My own life has been very blessed as well. In Pittsburgh, I was warmly welcomed by my new parish, and was able to rely on a lively and active community of volunteers to assist in my ministry. I met a girl wonderful enough not just to be worth marrying, but worth marrying in the middle of the COVID shutdown. (We are just a month away from celebrating two years of marriage.) In the six and a half years before coming to Pittsburgh, I lived in multiple states and a foreign country. But Pittsburgh is the only place I would call home

There are many parts to my job as Director of Faith Formation. There's management, and education, and evangelization. But if I can accomplish only one thing in this role, it would be to help our students, our families, and our entire parish community find their home in the Catholic faith and in our Church. It is here that God calls us to unite with His Son in the Sacrament of the Mass, to hear Jesus' words of forgiveness and absolution in the Sacrament of Confession, and to discover the fullness of joy as we conform our lives and hearts to the truths of the Gospel. We have all been blessed, and I hope and pray we would be open to receiving God's blessing in our lives. I look forward to finding out more about our home at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the months and years ahead.

07/17 Home: In Parish

Last week, I shared my hope that all of us could be open to receiving God's blessing in our lives and to find a home in our Church and in our parish. What would that look like? What makes a parish—or any place, for that matter—a home? Ideally, a parish is where we find community, in a world and culture that constantly works against true community. Our mobile and materialistic society prioritizes things over people, and our attempts to plug the gap with social media ... haven’t worked very well. We need in-person activities, in-person conversations, and in-person care.

A parish is a place where we can find these things, but establishing a home in a local parish isn't as simple as filling out a registration form and receiving church envelopes in the mail. Like all other forms of community, it requires stepping out and making connections. Some of that comes from volunteering, whether through organizations like the Ladies of Charity and Knights of Columbus or for the parish directly at Masses or (*ahem*) CCD. Some of that comes from attending social events like this weekend's Parish Picnic or the upcoming Parish Festival in August. Some of it could come just by being neighborly and helpful to the couple with three loud, squirming children next to you in the pew. That's the trick of finding a home in a parish: The best way to find one is to help make it a home for others.

So, my challenge for all of you reading (and I'll try to have a challenge for you every week) is this: Think about how you can reach out to someone at the parish you don't know yet. If you're going to the Parish Picnic, that's a great place to start.