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Palm Sunday – 24 March 2024
Today throughout the world, marches for peace are held. Palm Sunday has become a day on which rallies for peace are staged in many of the cities of the world. It leads us to ask what is it about this day that speaks of peace, of the hope for peace? Though many who march for peace today may not be Christian, and even though a number of people take part in the walks for a mixture of political motivation, nonetheless it would seem that the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem has something in it that speaks of the possibility of peace. How is this so? Perhaps we see the answer in the stress…
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3rd Sunday in Lent – 3 March 2024
There is a story about an American philosopher who went to Japan for a conference on religion. He overheard another American delegate speaking to a Shinto priest. “We’ve now been to a good many of your ceremonies,” said the delegate, ‘and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don’t get your ideology; I don’t get your theology.” The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head. “We don’t have an ideology”, he said. ‘We don’t have a theology. We dance!” Perhaps we have forgotten that Christianity, itself, began as a dance. There was no ideology, no comprehensive philosophy. Rather there was a series of extraordinary gestures in the life of Jesus…
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Ash Wednesday – 14 February 2024
We enter the Season of Lent, that time given us each year to renew our baptismal lives. In the waters of baptism we died to a purely natural life and we rose to a new life of promise and expectation. Now in the weeks that are to follow. as we prepare to celebrate Easter. we remember that extraordinary mystery into which we were immersed, and we admit that we are only half-living, and only fitfully loving. Yes, we recognise that the remarkable conversion detailed in our baptism is far from achieved, and we commit ourselves again to a new moment, We are called always into conversion. Again we are invited to see life in…
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6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 11 February 2024 Lunar New Year
It was Teresa of Avila, writing in the 16th century, who remarked that we should all learn how to read the texts of the gospels in their original language. Well, I doubt that many of us will be able to fulfil her challenge, including me. However, one of the things we begin to recognise about Scripture is that often enough the translation we are used to sometimes fails to convey the meaning of the original Greek, the language in which the gospels were written. The use of the phrase, “feeling sorry” in this account of Jesus’ encounter with a leper is a case in point. The original Greek illustrates that Jesus did not…
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4th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 28 January 2024
One of the privileges of our life is to be able to sit with someone else and to listen to their story and to hold their struggle to find meaning in their life. Sometimes those people with whom we might sit may have been struggling a long time, and alone. Sometimes they may have given up any struggle, and, rather, given in to the emotional or spiritual impasse they reached many years before. And sometimes they may have only just set out on a deeper search for themselves and for who God might be for them. Often, of course, we have no word to give, and the silence is hard to bear. On…
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Australia Day – 26 January 2024
We have a natural instinct for stories. As Pope Francis once wrote: “From childhood we hunger for stories just as we hunger for food. Stories influence our lives, whether in the form of fairy tales, novels, films, songs, news, even if we do not always realise it . . . Stories leave their mark on us; they shape our convictions and our behaviours. They can help us understand and communicate who we are.” [1] We delight in weaving stories. For this reason, there is a link, as Francis identifies, between the words, ‘textile’ and ‘text’. Both come from the Latin word, ‘to weave’ (texere). Yet we know the capacity we have…
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Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 January 2024
I am sure that some of us have heard the story of the chap driving in the country who stops to ask the famer which is the way to the city. Says the farmer to him in reply, “Oh, if I were going to the city, I wouldn’t start from here!” How often we give this very same reply to our faith, and to our relationship with God, and even with each other. We get caught in the thinking, that if I were going to relate to God better it couldn’t possibly be from how I am feeling at the moment. If only I didn’t have to contend with this pain or with…
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2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 14 January 2023
I once chanced to see a rather striking sign outside a church. The text of the sign was simply, “Can you hear the voice of God in the silences of the day?” Can you hear the voice of God in the silences of the day? I was particularly struck by it because often enough we expect to hear God in another way. We think God speaks to us in an exceptional way, or that he only speaks to exceptional people, and, sadly, we don’t include ourselves amongst them. So often we will hear people say, “God never speaks to me,” or the question behind this conclusion which is “Why does…
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Solemnity of Mary Mother of God – 1 January 2024
It is not unusual for us to hear from children the questions, “Who made God?” “If God has made everything, who made God?” “When did God begin?” Of course, God has neither beginning nor end. God is. Yet, to imagine something that has no beginning, that has always been, is not possible to comprehend. I think it is slightly easier for us to imagine something that may have no end, for we have a glimpse of eternity in our own experience of time, but to imagine something without a start is difficult indeed. We can apprehend such a mystery, but we cannot understand it cognitively. To contemplate such a mystery requires the recognition of the…
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Feast of the Holy Family – 31 December 2023
An article was published around this time last year by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schulz, “What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found is the Key to a Good Life.”[1] As the authors pointed out, since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. It started with 724 participants and has now had more than 1300 descendants of the original group. The authors claim that it’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life, ever done. And what is the key to health and happiness? What we know already deep in our hearts: good relationships. The trick is, however, that those relationships must be nurtured. As they go…
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