Christmas 2018: Christmas Eve Mass

Usually our evening services are held at World Vision (on Saturdays) or at St. Joseph Church, but for Christmas Eve this year the Khmer parish was having their evening liturgy when we would have had ours and they would have drowned us out; and World Vision doesn’t allow us to rent their auditorium except on Saturday nights.  The alternative was to use the Korean Ecumenical Diakonis Center where we go several times a year.

Many of our musicians and choir members are from the Philippines and a large percentage of them go home for the Christmas holidays, but we nevertheless always have a faithful, committed group to assist at our services.
I went to the Korean Center at 5:00 PM to set up for the 6:30 PM service. It turned out to be easier than I anticipated but still some of us were looking things over before mass to see if anything was missing.
The Korean center is a nice facility but the difficulty in using it is that we have to transport everything there from either St. Joseph Church or World Vision or the Maryknoll office. That constraint made our Christmas decorating for this mass rather simple.
We had a lot of first-time visitors with us this evening. And of about 200 people who were gathered, only 3 were born in Cambodia.   We are a real example of church, a group brought together from many nations because of a common faith.