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8th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 27 February 2022
The German writer, Deitrich Bonheoffer gave us the distinction between what he called, on the one hand, ‘cheap grace’ and, on the other, ‘costly grace.’ Writing in Germany in the 1930s he lamented the way in which the Christian Churches had so accommodated themselves to the prevailing currents as to have lost their genuine sense of discipleship of the Risen Lord. Of course, this is always a tendency for us. we struggle to hear the Word of God with clarity because of the chatter in which we are immersed. We begin to become seduced by many other words and narratives. The Canadian philosopher of religion, Charles Taylor, especially, has highlighted…
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7th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 20 February 2022
Let me share with you words of a woman from the former Yugoslavia: I am thirty-five years old. To my second son just born I gave the name, Jihad. So, he would not forget the testament of his mother – revenge. The first time I put my baby at my breast and told him, “May this milk choke you if you forget.” So be it. They have taught me to hate. For the last two months there was nothing in me. No pain, no bitterness. Only hatred. I taught these children to love. I did. I am a teacher of literature. But my students have become my persecutors. They have…
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6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 13 February 2022
With fondness, I recall being at the First Profession of Sr Sophie Boffa as a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. As signs of her consecration, Sophie was presented with the Constitutions of her Religious Order, her Religious Veil as a sign of her dedication, and also the small cross that she wears as a member of her Religious Congregation. In giving her this cross, her Religious Superior declared to Sophie, “Receive this cross. May it remind you of your weakness and brokenness and that you live by the Father’s strength within you.” The words struck me especially, because what Sophie undertook on…
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6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Word of God Sunday and Lunar New Year – 6 February 2022
Every now and then you come across someone expressing an idea that says it exactly the way you see it yourself. This happened to me reading an interview with a young Australian champion surfer. When asked whether he was a spiritual person, he replied, “I don’t particularly like the word spiritual. I prefer to see myself as a spirited person. I try to live my life with awareness and deliberation.” Given that I had written about spirituality in a similar way I thought that this was a good description of what it really means to lead a spiritual life. Being authentically spiritual is to be attentive to life – especially to the awakening moments that…
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4th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 January 2022
We all have our limits, our boundaries. At different times, in different places, with different people we are used to drawing the line in the sand. We take our stand from which we will not cross. We have our bottom line, from which we will negotiate no further. This of course is well understandable, and even necessary for a sense of self and identity without which we can have no genuine relationship. We are not simply reeds in the wind or chameleons who are constantly changing colours. We are constantly in a process of self-definitions, and sometimes that self-definition occurs negatively: we define ourselves as being not something or other.…
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3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – 23 January 2022
Over the last week or so we have once again been struck by the enormous power of nature and the destruction that it can create. Our hearts have gone out to the people of Tonga in their experience of the volcanic eruption and the subsequent tsunami. We think too of the people of Afghanistan, of Myanmar, of Ukraine – in so many places, people live with violence and fear. The stories of the world’s grief can be overwhelming for us. There is every instinct for us to close off, to close down, to retreat into what Pope Francis calls the ‘globalisation of indifference’, to become as unaffected as possible. Perhaps…
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2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 16 January 2022
With the great interest in spirituality it is not unusual to come across approaches to spirituality that envisage it to be primarily about the quest for peace and harmony, a kind of self-satisfaction. In this sense becoming spiritual is about becoming at “one with myself”, “connecting to my real self,” finding a centre within myself” that promises to make be immune from all the ups and downs, and the many contradictions, of life. The self-help sections of bookstores are full of literature that promise we need never feel powerless again, that success is always within our reach, that vitality and beauty are always attainable if we but follow a few…
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Baptism of the Lord – 2022
With the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism the Christmas Season comes to an end. We began the Christmas Season celebrating the birth of a Child. As we began the season celebrating new beginnings, so we conclude the season. Jesus’ baptism represents for him a new beginning, the beginning of his ministry to realise his mission. This invites us to consider what new beginnings are being extended to us. How is God calling us, within our own circumstances, to move forward in our life? What are the new possibilities into which we are being invited so that our own hearts might not lose their freshness no matter our age? Our hearts…
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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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