This has been a crazy winter.  This year we’ve experienced several radical extremes in our temperatures as we’ve watched the different cold fronts interact with the high-pressure bringing warm air up from the south, to produce some wild variations in our temperatures.  Can you tell that Fr. Dale and I have been watching a lot of the Weather Channel lately at the rectory?  I feel just like Kevin Gregory.  No, but it’s true.  How many times in the last two months, have we seen temperature swings of over forty degrees?  A month ago, on Monday it was 61 degrees in Westfield.  By Tuesday night, it was 14 degrees.  These radical temperature swings, along with snow and ice on the ground when it warms up, have made this a very foggy winter.  There was one morning, three weeks ago, when it was so foggy, that you couldn’t see the church from the front window of the rectory.  It was dense fog.  I had to drive to a meeting that same morning, and driving in dense fog is scary experience.  You can’t see very far in front of you.  You don’t know if there’s going to be a car stopped in front of you or not.  Even on roads that you know, you’re looking for stop signs that you know are there, and landmarks that are hidden in the fog, and of course, you slow down, because you can’t see.  Two days after we had our fog last month, there was one of those huge, chain-reaction pile- ups on a highway in Arizona in the fog.  Six people died when seventy-three vehicles slammed into each other in the fog, because they couldn’t see.  Those folks were blinded by the fog.  And it got them in trouble.  It got some of them killed.

      Other than when we are in the fog, for the most part, we take our vision, our ability to see for granted.  We wake up every morning, we rub the sleep out of our eyes, and we’re good to go with our vision.  Of course, for some of us, as we get older, we may need the assistance of glasses, or contacts, or Lasik vision correction.  But other than when we are blinded by the fog, very few of us really know what it is like to be blind.  Being blind can be terrifying.  Being blind makes you depend on the sight and the help of others.  Being blind means that what others can see and have no problem with, can be extremely dangerous when you can’t it.

      Today, Jesus heals a blind man.  He gives him his sight back.  In reality, Jesus really gives him his life back.  He doesn’t have to beg any more.  He doesn’t have to sit there beside the road.  He doesn’t have to be afraid of what he can’t see.  And you know, we hear this story, and we think, “Well, what a nice story.  Jesus really did a nice thing here.  He helped this man out.”  But because we aren’t blind, because we have no idea how important what Jesus is doing here really is, we just dismiss this story as another nice miracle.  And my brothers and sisters, THIS IS NOT ANOTHER NICE MIRACLE!  This man was blind but now he sees.  Jesus opened his eyes.  And most importantly of all, Jesus wants to do the same thing for you and me.

And of course, you say, “I’m not blind.  I don’t need Jesus to heal my vision.”  Maybe, you’re thinking, “I don’t even wear glasses.  What Jesus going to do to help me to see?”  Well let me tell you…

       We live every day in the fog of sin.  We live in a world, in a culture and society, that is so foggy, is so blinded and mixed up by our sins and by our sinful nature, that we can’t see God anymore.  We’ve put ourselves in a dense fog, and God is right there by us, but we don’t see it, because we are blinded by our sinfulness.  Sin is a lifestyle choice for us.  It’s not the death of our soul.  It’s not a blindness that keeps us from God.  It’s a right, it’s a privilege, it’s everybody’s prerogative, it’s subjective, and God help you if you notice someone else sin, because in our world, that’s really the greatest sin of all!  Today, there’s no such thing as sin.  Ask Oprah.  Ask Jerry Springer.  Ask Tyra Banks.  Tyra Banks -  How did that woman ever get her own TV show?    Make no mistake about it, my brothers and sisters, we are BLIND.  And today, more than ever,  maybe even more than this blind man from our Gospel story, we need Jesus to heal us also.  We’ve got to see.  We’ve got to see our sins.  We’ve got to see through the dense fog that’s out there in our world every single day.  If we don’t get this right, if we don’t see through some of these lies of our world, we risk a lot more than crashing our car, we risk losing our souls.

       Wake up, guys.  It’s time to see with new eyes.  We’ve got a lot to be healed of, and that can’t even start, if we’re lost in the fog.

May God bless us today on our Fourth Sunday of Lent,  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…AMEN !!!

St. Maria Goretti…Pray for us !!!