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The Bishop has mandated the closing of all churches and offices to help preserve safety and public health until further notice. Our staff is working remotely and we will continue to monitor the phones and our email.
Gospel Reflection
As our Lenten journey carries us forward, we are met with many challenges in the face of Covid19. The gospel of the First Sunday of Lent showed Jesus facing temptations after fasting for 40 days in the desert. We are in a desert of a different sort, where we fasting from familiar faces, dependable hearts, opportunities to be in community, even our sacred liturgy and holy communion is absent for most. We can get weary in the desert and choose a path of lesser resistance, but we encourage you to keep up healthy practices, appropriate social distancing and all the fasting we must do in these days.
This Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the gospel is the healing of the man, blind from birth. After the man was thrown out by the Pharisees as they rejected his testimony about his cure, Jesus sought him out and asked the newly sighted one:
“Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
He answered and said,
“Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?”
Jesus said to him,
“You have seen him, and
the one speaking with you is he.”
He said,
“I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him.
John 9:40-41
In whatever way you may be impacted or affected by the current crisis, remember that you have seen Jesus, the One who makes all things possible alive in our midst in word, sacrament and community. It wasn’t magic that brought sight to the blind, but grace - God’s action on our behalf to accomplish what we cannot accomplish for ourselves. We have known this grace in our communities. We are confident that the bond of charity that binds us one to the other, the charism of joy in the spirit of St. Philip and the maternal care of Our Lady, will one day make this desert bloom again.
So we pray with and for each other as we walk on. May the grace that abounds within and around us because of our belief in the Son of Man give us clarity of vision in the days ahead.
Fr. Mark and Fr. Michael