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24th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 11 September 2022
One of the most important things we can learn about the gospels is the nature of the language that the writers use. It is the language of parables – a language, it seems, favoured by Jesus himself. Jesus was a great teacher, as we know. He was a great storyteller and he constantly uses stories to communicate his message. But the parables are not simply stories. A parable is very particular kind of story: it is a story that is designed to confuse us, to unsettle us, even in some cases, to shock us. We have grown used to them. They are not unfamiliar. But yet, there is something in each of them that doesn’t make sense.…
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 4 September 2022
The populist American writer, Robert Fulgham once told of the story of a famous international chess player, Frank Marshall. Marshall made, what Fulgham termed, the most beautiful move ever made on a chessboard. In a crucial game in which he was evenly matched with another master player, Marshall found his queen under serious attack. The queen is the most powerful piece on the board. There were several avenues of escape, and since the queen is the most important offensive piece, the spectators all assumed that Marshall would observe convention and move his queen to safety. Deep in thought, Marshall used all the time available to him to consider the board…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Social Justice Sunday – 28 August 2022
In the annals of Christian legend there is a famous story about one of the early Roman martyrs, St Lawrence. Lawrence lived in a time of persecution, and as a deacon was responsible for his community’s administration. The prefect of Rome had already taken the Bishop of Rome into custody and was about to do the same to Lawrence. However, realizing that Lawrence had the keys to the community store, and thinking that this might contain much gold and silver, he first demanded that Lawrence show him the location of the store. Being a wily administrator and not losing his cool, Lawrence said, “Give me three days and I will…
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 August 2022
All of us want the best that is possible. However, this can easily insinuate itself through all of our life to make for unrealistic expectations. In our relationships we can easily be led into thinking about how we might achieve the best partner, or the best marriage, or the best relationship. We can even subtly begin to look for the perfect partner, the perfect family, the perfect friendship, the perfect parish, the perfect government – and become very disappointed when we don’t think we have found it. Of course, what we do find is always someone that is imperfect and limited. Every one of us is limited. Our partners are…
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Solemnity of the Assumption 2022
Some weeks ago, if we were sufficiently sensitive, we may have noticed that the character of the light during the day had changed as it does around this time every year. There is a day around the end of July where something changes. This year I noticed it on Tuesday 26 July. Now, a little while later something also begins to shift in the landscape around us. In our gardens and along the sides of the road we will notice the wattles coming into bloom. Ribbons of glorious yellow now thread their way along our highways. The blooming of the wattles had a special significance for our aboriginal brothers and…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 14 August 2022
The philosopher, Rosa Luxemburg once wrote: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”[1] Luxemburg is a Marxist thinker, but I think this declaration is to be something quite true. The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening. It reminded me of a wonderful sentence in Pope Francis’ recent exhortation to the Youth of our Church when he declared, “I ask you to be revolutionaries, I ask you to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes you are incapable of responsibility, incapable…
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19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 7 August 2022
Many years ago there was quite a popular film that was made called, “Dead Poets Society.” It starred Robyn Williams as a slightly eccentric schoolteacher – if ‘slight’ can ever be used to describe Robyn William’s eccentricity. At this school, though, he mentored a group of students into realising their potential. The catchcry of the film, Carpe Diem, “Seize the Day”, became somewhat famous in itself and got to be widely used. The film was very much a portrayal of the philosophy of Henry Thoreau. Thoreau was a well-known American humanist philosopher of the 19th century. His famous work was called, Walden, and was an account of him leaving the city and retiring to the side of…
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18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 31 July 2022
How would we describe the most precious, the most valuable thing in our possession? What would be the thing that we would not exchange for any amount of money or satisfaction? In other words, what is of the greatest value for us? Years ago, there was a wealthy man who, with his devoted young son, shared a passion for art collecting. Together they travelled around the world, adding only the finest art treasures to their collection. The widowed man looked on with satisfaction as his only child became an experienced art collector. One winter though war broke out and the young man left to fight in battle. Only after a few short weeks, his father…
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17th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 24 July 2022
If we were to ask ourselves what personal characteristics we would most value about ourselves, I doubt that many of us would answer ‘dependency’. We live in a culture which prizes anything but dependency. Independence, autonomy, self-reliance are the things that we aspire to for ourselves and that we like to see in other people. Further, in recent times we have coined a whole lot of phrases and words that make us even more suspicious of the experience of dependency: we speak of ‘dependent relationships,’ of people just acting out of their dependencies, and we speak of the phenomenon of ‘co-dependency’ and all it variations. In short dependency does not have much sale value…
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16th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 17 July 2022
Some twenty-five years ago I completed my Master’s thesis in Theology. When the title of the thesis was read out at the Graduation Ceremony everyone laughed. I don’t think that they were laughing at me in particular, but the title of the thesis was so incomprehensible to everyone that it certainly drew a chuckle from the audience. The title was “Manifestation of the Other: A Study of David Tracy’s Heterology.” Perhaps it is no wonder it drew a gasp of incomprehension. What was the thesis all about? Well, through the 1980s and 1990s David Tracy was a philosopher of religion writing out of Chicago. He was a writer who sought to address the question of how…
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