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27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 8 October 2023
I am sure that some of us have heard of the clergyman who lived in a town that was hit by a major flood. The water was a foot deep in his living room. Some parishioners in a boat rowed up to his door, asking them to join him. “No, go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be just fine. God is taking care of me.” So, they left. Then the water rose to the second floor. Back came the anxious parishioners in the boat. And they asked him to join them. Again, he refused. By the time the boat came back once more, the house had been completely engulfed and the clergyman was standing on his chimney. “Father,” his parishioners…
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26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 1 October 2023
On one of my very first visits to Sydney I was taken by a friend who works with homeless youth to some of the places in which such young people live and hang out. I recall the time I was with them around a campfire near St. Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst. They had got the campfire going from some curbside formwork and were preparing to shelter against a winter Sydney night. Most of them were on drugs of some kind, many of them prostituting – all of them with background stories of enormous tragedy. And yet, as I left them that night I could not but be struck by the…
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25th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 24 September 2023
We often say religion and politics don’t mix. And it is true we must be careful to avoid the politicization of religious faith in such a way that religious faith becomes a vehicle to achieve political ends. However, at the same time, paradoxically we can never separate faith and politics as if we can behave one way in an internal world of spirituality and another way in the external world of civic affairs. Politics is about choices, and the choices we, ourselves, make cannot but be informed by our discipleship of the Lord. This will be something very important to consider carefully as we approach the forthcoming Referendum on constitutional change.…
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Feast Day of Our Lady of Sorrows – Parish Celebration – Sunday 17 September 2023
As we appreciate, our Parish community has been on a remarkable journey in these recent years as we consider what it means to be Church in the city. We have developed our Parish Mission – Bringing the Light of Christ to the City: We Love, We Serve, We Grow – and now together as a Parish-in-Council we have begun to reflect on how we might put this into practice going forward. When we talk about being Church in the city we are, of course, not simply talking about this magnificent building. We are talking about Church as a living community of faith. And yet, our church building is not incidental. It is…
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 10 September 2023
Some of you would be aware that for many years of my life I lived as a Trappist monk. Trappist life is a life lived in community, and most people would think of a monastery as a place of peace and tranquillity where Christian virtue was lived in its perfection. However, of course, the reality is quite different. A monastic community is really just like any other family: ordinary people who struggle to make life together work with all the joys and pains we all know in regard to this. I recall the great response of one of the old Irish monks in the community, Br Gabriel, who used to reply to the question…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 3 September 2023
From time to time in life, disillusionment can really settle upon us. Why can’t we and others live up to the ideals that are important to us? Why can’t things just be as they should be? Why can’t people live as we want them to? We can be left wondering, are our ideals ever possible? Are they ever able to be realised? However, one of the most radical truths we will ever learn in life is that which is expressed by the Australian novelist, Les Murray, “The mystery of life is not solved by success, but by failure, a perpetual becoming.” We can spend our whole life learning the meaning of this. It confuses…
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21st Sunday of Year A – 27 August 2023.
Anxiety about identity may, in the future, well be observed as one of the defining characteristics of our own age. The curious paradox is that whilst, on the one hand, perhaps as never before, we have the opportunity to celebrate individuality and diversity perhaps as never before have we been less sure about who we are. In the musical The Gondaliers Gilbert and Sullivan once suggested ‑ rather prophetically I think of our own time ‑ when, “everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody; if everybody is abnormal, we don’t need to worry about anybody.” And so, we have fallen into the story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 20 August 2023
In his novel, The Great World, the Australian writer, David Malouf talks of ‘the little sacraments of daily existence – “all those unique and repeatable events, . . . movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the beginning.”[1] Malouf is alluding to the flow of life that goes on underneath the façade of life, under all the things that occur through the exercise of…
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19th Sunday in Year A – 13 August 2023
Many years ago, in a little Californian fishing village, I picked up a small poster which reads, “Dear God, help me; the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small.” None of us would doubt that life is sometimes turbulent and often chaotic. In fact, the ocean is good metaphor for how we experience life. At times, it seems calm and full of invitation; on other occasions, it is full of threat and a fearful place. For the people of the Scriptures, particularly, the ocean was a symbol more of chaos than anything. It was the place of darkness and uncertainty – the place of hidden monsters. The…
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Feast of the Transfiguration – Sunday 6 August 2023
I recall once, in a previous parish, having to deal with a terrible termite infestation. One of the rooms in the parish office needed particular attention. I was standing there, looking down at the boards hollowed out by the voracious termites, admittedly feeling rather crestfallen at the implications, when the technician, explaining in great detail the procedures he was implementing, suddenly sparked, “I just love my job!” His exclamation, which was clearly sincerely felt, was like a real ray of light into my anxiety. His enthusiasm for the technology that is behind the system we were considering implementing, and his obvious joy at what he was accomplishing in the termination…
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