3 February 2022 - Friday of the 4th week in Ordinary Time - Hebrews 13:1-8

      We come to our last reading from the letter to the Hebrews today in our daily Mass. We have been hearing from Hebrews for the past several weeks. Next week, in our daily Masses, our first readings will come from the book of Genesis.  

       As I reflected upon our readings from the letter to the Hebrews, I thought about how letter writing has become a lost art in the modern world.  Things like Facebook, Instagram, texts, phone calls, and emails have almost made letter obsolete. Especially when I lived overseas as a missionary, I used to write a lot of letters a lot, but now I rarely send a letter.  

        This last part of the letter to the Hebrews gives a lot of practical advice. We may ask ourselves how we welcome the stranger or reach out to the prisoner, how we give thanks for what we have in life, how we help the oppressed and marginalized, and how we remember and give thanks for those who passed down the faith to us. To that last point, a good friend of my mom’s contacted me several months into the pandemic. She now lives in Texas. She was my sponsor when I entered the Church back in 1992 in California. She was a co-worker of my mom’s at the public library where they both worked. She was incredibly kind to my mom when my mom had breast cancer.  It is so wonderful to be able to be in contact with someone who had a key role in my life of faith.  And I give thanks for her. 

        I want to close by mentioning St Blaise, the saint we celebrate today. His feast day is connected to the traditional blessing of the throats with candles, one of the beloved devotional traditions of our faith.  St Blaise, a bishop in Sebastea, Armenia, was martyred in 316, only 5 years after religious tolerance was granted to Christianity in the Roman Empire. During the religious persecutions that still raged there even in this era of supposed tolerance, Blaise hid out and lived as a hermit in solitude and prayer. Legend has it that as Blaise was captured, but when he was being hauled off to prison, he came upon a mother and her young son. The young son was choking on a fish bone lodged in his throat.  At Blaise's command, the boy coughed up the bone and his life was saved.  After repeated beatings and torture for refusing to worship foreign idols, Blaise was beheaded and has long been remembered as a martyr of our faith. We will now offer the traditional blessing of throats in honor of St Blaise.