14 February 2020 – Friday of 6th week in Ordinary Time – Mark 7:31-37

       A group of people bring a man to Jesus for healing – this man is deaf and he has a speech impediment. Jesus tells the man – Be opened!  And then the man could plainly speak.  Sometimes it seems like we are deaf ourselves, doesn’t it, just like the man in the Gospel today.   We may want to hear God’s word, we may want to hear God’s will speaking to us, but sometimes that message is difficult to hear, drowned out by all the other noise in the world around us, noise that we often voluntarily put in our lives.  Other times it may seem like we have a speech impediment.  The words we want to speak don’t come out the way we want them to.  We speak unkindly, ignoring the message God gives us to say.  As we hear of this Gospel story of healing today, I think of the sacrament of the anointing of the sick that we have in our Catholic faith. That Sacrament brings healing into our lives, it brings comfort to our souls and to our physical bodies. Pope Francis has said that the Sacrament of the Eucharist is also a sacrament of healing for our soul and forgiveness for our sins.  

      Today, February 14, we celebrate Valentine’s day in our secular world.  However, in our liturgical calendar, we celebrate two brothers who were born in Thessalonica in Greece in the 9th century: St Cyril and St Methodius.  Cyril was ordained a priest in Constantinople and Methocius became a monk in his native Greece. In 863, the brothers set off to become missionaries to the Slavs. While missionaries had gone to the Slavic people before with little success, Cyril and Methods learned the vernacular language and even invented a Slavic alphabet, which they used to translate the Gospels. Their missionary work was a great success.  They are honored as missionaries who were innovative and creative, respecting the culture of the native people in their missionary work. To this day, Cyril and Methodius are a great example of faith for us.