From the Pastor's Pen - 4th Sunday of Lent

The Man Born Blind, this Sunday’s gospel, is a great one for all times—including these times. Yes he’s born blind—born with limitations, wounds. People blame him, shun him, though some take pity on him. No one engages him as a full human until Jesus does. The “healing” done by Jesus, like other ones, is just a simple bathing, but it brings the man to physical wholeness. His total personal wholeness is not complete until he meets Jesus again, and learns who it was that healed him: I AM, the name he gave the woman at the well last week—I AM, the God of the Burning Bush Moses encountered. The God who is, who was, and who ever shall be. This is the God the man had to encounter to be saved. The man went off as a disciple to tell others in whom he’d been saved.

You can take every detail of my retelling of the story above, and put your own name in for the man’s. This, like the other conversion stories, is our story. All the way, that is, until he tells so many others how he’s been saved---then that’s up to each of us to see if it, too is our story.

Of course, like everyone else, the priests and the Parish Staff have never been through anything like this before. The staff is doing extremely well with all the uncertainties. We’re getting a lot of calls and e-mails, understandably. Some of them are questions for which we just don’t know the answers—How long will this last? What do I do about __________? And sometimes there are suggestions about services we could provide people with, and often they’re outside the guidelines we’re all given by the government levels or the Archdiocese. Please know that we’re in constant touch with all of those, and trying to provide comfort and spiritual and physical nourishment to our people, and those beyond, every way we can within the guidelines mandated that will help us all to have the quickest recovery possible.

-Fr. Tom