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Christmas 2024
It is often remarked that it is children who make Christmas. Often, they are at the centre of our thoughts and practices when we come to celebrate Christmas – whether it be our own children, or grandchildren, nieces or nephews. Christmas is an enchanting time for children – they are full of expectation and excitement. Their sense of wonder at the decorations, the music, the family customs, Santa Claus, and our gift-giving are all infectious. We lead them to the crib, and we bend down to their level and see the scene through their eyes. The characters of Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus, the shepherds, the wise men and…
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Children’s Christmas Mass – 24 December 2024
Over the last four weeks we have been decorating our Christmas trees. So as we sit in front of our Christmas tree let me tell you the tale of three trees.[1] Three little trees stood high upon a mountain discussing their dreams for the future. The first little tree looked up at the dazzling night sky and said, “I want to carry the treasure of kings and queens. I want to be beautiful. I want to be filled with the riches of the world. The second little tree saw a nearby stream, and said, “I want to be a mighty sailing vessel. I want to sail in the roaring oceans,…
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Fourth Sunday of Advent – 22 December 2024
The season of Advent that we have been celebrating in the time leading up to the celebration of Christmas this week is a season characterized by hope – the theme of the Year of Jubilee which Pope Francis will open on 24 December, Christmas Eve. It has often struck me that in Australia we have our own particular experience of hope. From penal settlement and convict experience, through to the mythology of the pioneer farmer, and to the shores of Gallipoli, the experience of so many migrants beginning life anew here, and extending even to our fascination with sport, Australians, historically, have defined themselves as those who often find themselves…
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Third Sunday of Advent – 15 December 2024
I think from every account we would say that the past year has been eventful in our world. The events that have played out on different levels continue to suggest that we are not only in an era of change but a change of era. Changing moments evoke the paradox of fear and hope deep within us. We glimpse the enormity of time and our fragility and insignificance before it whilst at the same time we wonder about new beginnings, about something new emerging. We have the sense that something is passing, we are leaving behind something. We sense that we are crossing over into something unknown and new. We…
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Second Sunday of Advent – 8 December 2023
Christmas is associated with family for us, and often enough with family reunion. Maybe family members who have been away for awhile are coming back home. Christmas is often a time, too, when we re-unite with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year. Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we are full of expectancy about it – even if this expectancy from time to time becomes a kind of dread! This kind of expectancy is, in different ways, at the heart of the Christmas mystery, and today’s gospel takes us to this…
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First Sunday of Advent – 1 December 2024
There used to be a Chinese curse which went, “May you live in interesting times!” It is hard to know whether we live under this curse at this time, but we certainly live in a time of great change. As Pope Francis himself remarked recently, it is not even that we live in an era of change, but that we live in a change of era. And it is this that make the times even more interesting. Because of the uncertainty of change and the insecurity that pervasive change engenders in most of us, it is easy to resist change and to defend ourselves from its demands in different ways. We can develop a…
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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 17 November 2024
The year now, of course, has the sense of beginning to wind up. The HSC exams are over, university exams will be over in the coming week or so, the committees we might be on are having their final meetings for the year, the diaries are filling up with all the end of year social activities that we try and fit in before Christmas. So, too, the Church’s liturgical year is coming to its end. Next week it comes to its finality in the celebration of Christ the King, and then we begin a new year in the life of our Church with the season of Advent. A year ends,…
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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 10 November 2024
There is something that may strike us as quite peculiar in this Gospel story. Why would someone so poor put all she had to live on to support something which was already endowed by the wealthy and powerful? Why would she do it? This was not a tax: the woman was not going to be punished for not “paying up.” And yet of her own accord the widow puts what is for her an extraordinary sum of money into the treasury. Surely, one would think, she would have considered herself exempt. The money she put in was probably even that which she had gained from begging. Why then give it…
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31st Sunday in Ordinary Time – 3 November 2024
In his first encyclical Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI drew our attention particularly to the unity of faith and life, in which, as he wrote, “the usual contraposition between worship and ethics falls apart” (n. 14). As he expressed, “Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me.”[1] It is a fitting commentary on the gospel that is given us to today in which the love of God and the love of each other are brought…
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30th Sunday of Ordinary Time – 27 October 2024
In the history of Australian art a new development took place around the end of the 19th century. It was called the Heidelberg School, and listed such artists as Streeton, McCubbin, Roberts, Conder and Withers. These artists’ work was very different from that which had come before it: the work of people like Glover, Martens and Chavalier. The scenes were different, the colours even more so. To set an example of each side by side would dramatically highlight the differences. Of course the Heidelberg school coincided with the rise in Australian nationalism in the 1880s and 90s. People were beginning to see the country in which they were living differently. …
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