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Epiphany of the Lord – 2 January 2022
We are but a day into the new year, a new year which has started with the most extraordinary sense of our vulnerability – our vulnerability before the power of a contagious virus, our control of which still eludes us after two long years. This Sunday we gather conscious of those we know who have been recently infected, who are in isolation, and who cannot be with us. A new year ordinarily starts with optimism and possibility. This year has started with enormous concern. Indeed, in the face of the historic moment by which we are gripped there is little room for appeals to optimism. They present as facile and…
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1 January 2022 – Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
One of the most significant lessons that I have learnt in life is about the necessity and power of paradox in our lives. Spiritual experience attends to sets of opposites; it does not seek to resolve them. In the paradoxes and the intersections of our life we are, as one writer puts it, we are “stretched out amid the opposites in [our] life, between hanging on and letting go, between involvement and surrender, between deep engagement and gentle detachment. This is [our] crucifixion and [our] joy. It is [our] crucible in all its insecurity and beauty, fragility and possibility.”[1] A problem is to be solved. A paradox, on the other, is…
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Feast of the Holy Family – 2021
At my father’s funeral several years ago, I happened to meet a man whom I had not known before. When I asked him his connection to my father he replied, “Well actually my great, great grandfather was responsible for bringing your great, great grandfather to Tasmania.” I was fascinated by the information which resolved some confusion as to how my forbears came to Tasmania. The man at the funeral had the answer: Samuel Ranson arrived in the Port of Launceston on 12 August 1841 to be the overseer of Wickford’s – a property near the township of Longford, near Launceston. This disclosure opened up further discovery for me – that…
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Christmas Children’s Homily – 2021
The wonderful story of Christmas that we have just told never seems to tire of telling. It is a great story – a story through which we are brought to what is most important about life: the celebration of new life, the wonder at how God’s life comes into the world, the importance of two people, Mary and Joseph, placing their trust in God’s promises It’s a story which gives rise to many other stories, too, that seek to come to the meaning of what we celebrate this evening. Let me tell you one of these stories from far away Russia. It was the night the Christ-Child came to Bethlehem. In a country…
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Christmas 2021
After months of a smoke laden city towards the end of 2019, horrifying bushfires over the start of 2020, only to be followed by an historic pandemic with the dramatic national lockdown commencing in March of last year, people were ready to dance on the grave of 2020. No one was imagining the trauma of a more sustained lockdown in 2021, just as no one would imagine that its outcome would be such a concerning surge of new Covid cases as we face a new year. We are in the grip of a pandemic of a virus that will not yet yield to our control. The great moments of history…
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Fourth Sunday of Advent – 2021
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. It has often struck me that in Australia we have our own experience of hope. From penal settlement and convict experience, through to the mythology of the pioneer farmer, and to the shores of Gallipoli, and extending even to our fascination with sport, Australians, historically, have defined themselves as those who often find themselves pitched against an overwhelming odd with every prospect of defeat, yet discovering there a new sense of solidarity with one another. As Joachim Dirks once commented, The preoccupation with…
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Third Sunday of Advent – 2021
Whenever I hear today’s gospel the first image that comes into my mind is a particular cartoon of Leunig. It is of one of his typical figures seated at a chess board which is against a window opening out to the night sky. The figure’s chess partner is indeed the night sky, the unknown, the mystery, God himself. “What then must we do?” – the question repeated three times in today’s gospel – seems to be such an apt title to the cartoon. “What then must we do?” It is the question with which we are confronted so often in our life which feels many times like a chess game…
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Second Sunday of Advent – 2021
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 – 2021
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, but we certainly live in a time of great change. As Pope Francis himself remarked, 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. The hardest challenge for us in a situation of change, is to listen deeply, to be alert for both the dangers and the possibilities. In fact, the full Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times…
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Homily for Red Wednesday 24 November 2021
On this day each year, the Church celebrates the memory of the Vietnamese martyrs. Though the first Christian missionaries arrived in Vietnam in 1533, it was not until 1615 that the Jesuits were able to establish a permanent mission in the central region of the country, around Vinh. In 1627, a Jesuit went north to establish another mission, the same year the first martyr was beheaded. More were executed in 1644 and 1645. The persecution of Christians followed for another 150 years or so. However, it was in the first half of the 19th century, in 1833, that all Christians were ordered to renounce the faith, and to trample crucifixes…
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