Blindness

March 28th, 2017 | Posted by K Graham in Bulletin Message | Spiritual - (Comments Off on Blindness)

March 26th 2017 Bulletin Message, Fr. Floyd McKinney

In a previous parish that I was assigned, there was a gentleman who was blind. He never asked any special favors, however he did have his wife to guide him if he was not familiar with a place. He was a lector at the parish, and used his braille lector book to do the readings. On Holy Saturday night when the first readings were done he truly could read in the ‘darkness’ of the Old Testament. Even though there were night lights that could not be turned off, all the other lights were turned off so we could experience the readings in the dark as they are supposed to be read.

One of the obvious themes in the readings for the weekend is blindness, both the physical kind and the mental kind. Jesus was able to heal not only the physical blindness of the people but tried to help them see the fact that some of them were blind to their human weaknesses. Just as the Scribes and Pharisees had a hard time looking at the reality of their lives, sometimes we too have a hard time ‘seeing’ that we need to m
ake changes in our life if we want to follow Jesus in a more perfect way. The easiest examples are to point out those who drink too much but are blind to the idea that they are addicted, or we can add those who cannot see that they are ‘hooked’ on some prescription medicine or some other substance. There are times when I do not want to admit that I don’t pray enough; I might even say that I am blind to the fact that my lack of prayer has an effect on the way that I serve you, the people of God. All of us can look at our life and discern where we need to work on our personal blindness. If we notice the blindness in our life then we have the possibility to, as we see in the second reading… “Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth. Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

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Our Faith Does Not Take a Vacation

March 6th, 2017 | Posted by K Graham in Uncategorized - (Comments Off on Our Faith Does Not Take a Vacation)

March 5th 2017 Bulletin Message, Fr. Floyd McKinney

So you have started your Lent; you are fasting and abstaining like a good Catholic should. That is a good thing. In the scriptures we see that there can be more for us to do; we can reach out to others. If you look on the internet for “fasting and Catholic tradition” you can find a lot about what, when, and how. That means there is a lot to read about the details of our lenten penances.

If we want to make our sacrifices a little more spiritual, maybe we should look into the ‘why’ of our lenten observances. Since we are talking about our relationship with God we usually think more about ‘what am I doing spiritually?’. If we look at the scriptures we can see that at least in part our spiritual life is connected to our practical life. Nurse the sick, it tells us; clothe the naked, feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted. It adds, turn the other cheek, return good for evil, give to the poor, go forth and preach to all nations.

We can see then that the Gospels help us to look at social justice. We might say, of course we believe in social justice; we do not want war, poverty or even human trafficking and we know we need to take care of our planet. We understand the problem in our mind but can we say that we are doing something in our day to day life. THAT is why we sacrifice during this preparation for Easter, to remind us that we do indeed need to remember that our faith does not take a vacation. God has called each of us, individually, uniquely, to live in this life, this world…and help build a better one.

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