During the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the outdoor movies we were able to show last summer: Mary Poppins.

Not that I was ever expecting a Disney musical about a British nanny to have spiritual implications for my life, but when I was watching the end of the movie last year it struck me that in many ways the life of Mary Poppins has a lot in common with the life of a missionary.  In the film, Mary Poppins comes from a faraway place in order to help two children connect with their father and to help their father connect with them.  Missionaries do the same thing… except instead helping people connect with their individual fathers we strive to help people connect with Our Father.

For the past 102 years in Canada, the Paulists have sought to help the people we have come across do just that.  In Montreal, in Vancouver, in countless missions across the continent, and of course in Toronto.  With the establishment of the University of Toronto Newman Centre, through Fr. Frank Stone’s brainchild the Paulist Information Centre, and through and with the people of Saint Peters, we have sought to give the people of Canada an experience of God through our ministry.  In the process, the people of Canada have also provided us with a constantly unfolding experience of Emmanuel, of “God with us,” through your hospitality, kindness, faithfulness, and love.

At the end of the movie, Poppins watches wistfully as the Banks’ children skip happily with their father as the sing, “Let’s go fly a kite!”  The parrot head that makes up the base of her umbrella, rubbing salt in the wound, casually mentions that the children love their father more than they loved her… to which Poppins replies, “That’s as it should be.”  That sentiment sounds a lot like the message we have all been reflecting on these past few months as a Christian community: we are not people of the messenger, but the message.  And so, just as Mary Poppins had to move on to help other families connect with each other, so too we Paulists must move on to continue the mission in which Saint Paul embarked so many millennia ago to help people connect to God through Jesus Christ.

Still, while Mary Poppins was trying to put up a brave front by saying that “practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking,” we all know that there is always sadness in saying good-bye… especially when we are talking about relationships that go as deep as the Paulist Fathers and the people of St. Peter’s.  I can’t help but wonder if Saint Paul also felt the same way when it was time for him to say good-bye to the people of Corinth, to the people of Thessalonica, to the people of Ephesus.  I’m sure he did, especially given the enthusiastic greetings he began each of his letters to the communities he had once been a part of and the blessings with which he concluded those letters.

And so, as Paul concluded in his second letter to the Corinthians, “Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.  All the saints greet you.  The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you”  Or, as Mary Poppins might put it, skip hand in hand with your Father and sing, “Let’s go fly a kite!”

Thank you all for allowing us to fly a kite with you for all of these years.  God bless.

-Fr. Tom Gibbons, CSP