The Feast Day of Saint Sebastian of Jackson In the Year 2020 of Our Lord

The year behind us was remarkable in so many ways, and, much the same, this year’s celebration of our holy father Sebastian of Jackson was no exception.

Devotees and pilgrims from his ancestral Herceg Novi, Jackson’s sister city, from his native San Francisco, from Los Angeles, where he founded the first church and served therein, as well as from other parts of California and the United States of America, unfortunately could not fulfill their great wish this year to visit Jackson again on the day of its Patron Saint. However, it was precisely in their absence that we felt their presence perhaps even more strongly than in the previous years. Filling the half-empty church with their countenances, within our hearts and with our spiritual sight, we pondered how grateful we had been for each other in the past, how much we appreciated and nurtured our dearly paid unity in the Body and Blood of Christ, crucified and shed for us? How much had we valued Time as a gift, how wisely had we used it, redeemed and sanctified it with our lives, or had we delayed our repentance and reconciliation while forgetting that we do not know the day or the hour that our earthly journey will come to its end? Now, at a time with far fewer of us being physically present in the church, each face shone before us as the living icon of God, and those who were absent seemed closer and dearer than ever before.