Fr Prodencio Bognay reads from the Gospel of Matthew (8: 1-4) in which Jesus encounters a leper who says to him ‘Sir, if you want to you can cure me’.

Fr Prodencio notes that, after curing the leper Jesus says, ‘Mind you, do not tell anyone, but go and show yourself to the priest and make the offering prescribed by Moses.”

Among the things we have lost in our human evolution is our deliberate choice to do everything in our life in relation to our faith or in the context of our spirituality. What we have developed so far is to do everything in relation to our physical life and our material world.

Along our evolution, we have come to this age when we perceive the spiritual and the material realities as opposite and rival worlds.

With the way we behave nowadays, we have put more of our trust in the material world while we just set aside spiritual realities into the remote corners of our beliefs.

Fr Prodencio says while he does not mean to deny the value of this material world where we live, the words of Jesus to the leper who was cured invite us to consider living in the context of the spiritual realities of this material world.

After the miraculous healing of the leper, Jesus invited him to perform his religious obligations.

While we may have our day-to-day concerns or our “leprosies” in relation to our material survival, Fr Prodencio says may we also recognize the value of life in terms of the spiritual aspect of our existence.